**4. Rapid, responsive, relevant simulations**

Confronted by the many challenges facing a business academic to bring a relevant simulation rapidly into the classroom, it is possible to see why some give up, some accept the nearest match to what they need, and some will accept whatever was offered on the syllabus last time around. It is by no means laziness on the part of the academic but a diminished capacity to deal with technologies that they are unfamiliar with, navigating internal approval systems to purchase something new, or having the time to understand the different forces being modeled in each new simulation. Change, in this respect at least, in terms of pedagogic practice is incredibly difficult. These are the many factors that are already at play before any consideration is given as to how new students may receive any form of changes being made to their learning experiences. While a new management simulation may bring quantifiable improvement on the previous syllabus there will still be a need to accommodate and adjust student expectations to decouple the association of simulation in management education from their perceptions of game-based simulators or games in general. The reality is that, in terms of the student experience, the clock can only be reset to zero with every new delivery not many have deep and sweeping change may be in contrast to the previous delivery.

The solution to the many issues raised by this current situation is not a simple, neat, or pretty one as it necessarily exposes the workings of a simulation beyond the attention of the developer alone. It could be argued to also be an idealistic one that expresses a preference for open access and open-source forms of working in preference to a closed proprietary system. The solution also requires more organizations to work together and interact then it is currently the case within the productised world of packaged software genre of management simulations. However, this level of transparency and collaboration is itself an appropriate way to transact contemporary business and focuses on the adage that you concentrate on what you do best. That is, academics are good at knowledge exchange and software developers develop systems that can enable this knowledge exchange. The solution is represented by four separate layers of activity and development. Each layer is independent of the other and can certainly function independently without knowledge of one another. Separating these four layers of activities enables existing organizations and individuals involved with management education to potentially contribute their own specialism without having to become specialists in any one of the other layers. Importantly, academics can (once again) become engaged with the creative process of building simulations by contributing their own existing knowledge without having to become technicians or developers. The additional benefits of this layered ecosystem are clear in contrast to the existing packaged software approach.

The four layers described in this proposed solution for a simulation ecosystem are the story layer, the simulation description layer, the decision-making layer, and the visualization layer. Each of these layers is presented as part of a dynamic simulation ecosystem.

#### **4.1 The story layer**

The story layer is the ideation layer of a simulation. It exists within completed research, case studies, and within the experiences of those creating the simulation. The story layer already exists through a range of resources, including the UK's Case Center (thecasecentre.org), where thousands of different business case studies are curated and made available (for a fee) to students and academics. The value of cases as the core story for a new simulation is that they are relatively brief and, in the written form, they then follow a consistent structure. Importantly, business cases are not complete stories. "The case must quickly pull the reader in and force them to think about what they would do and why" [19] and "the most common mistake that new case writers make is that they think a case should be a story from the start to finish. In fact, it should be half a story. Students should be left asking, what am I going to do now." [19] One of the reasons for the success of business cases in the classroom is the similar kinesthetic responses it provokes in students to that of a simulation—it asks them to do something rather than wait for the teacher's next statement or observation.

The story layer sets out the environment, the constraints, and the general context in which the activities are occurring and then makes the student decide on the subsequent course of action. Most case studies ask for one set of decisions from students, possibly from a range of different variables. Working through a case study in a classroom equates to playing one turn of a simulation. The experience without the burden of software is a test of the story and its viability as a full-blown simulation. A simulation would continue the decision-making across multiple rounds and often pit the consequences of the students' decisions against one another, presuming that they comprise the entire universe of external factors. In this way, running through a
