Case Study: Digital Transformation Leaders Game with Vlerick Business School

Customer: Vlerick Business School

The Challenge—Engagement Is Not a Given

How can you change a digital transformation lecture into an engaging learning game? How can you maximise learning impact and make it easy for the participants to transfer knowledge into action?
This is the design challenge we set out to solve together with Professor Stijn Viaene and his research team at Vlerick Business School. They were looking for a game which would bring the concepts alive and engage the participants beyond the theory.

VLERICK BUSINESS SCHOOL

Vlerick is a leading international business school, consistently ranked amongst the top business schools in Europe and the world. With over 22000 alumni spread across the world, Vlerick strives to nurture an international mindset by bringing together a diverse mix of cultures, backgrounds and outlooks. What truly sets Vlerick apart is the passion for innovation and enterprise. The school is driven by a pragmatism that reflects in its action-oriented teaching methods.

Changing the game with Digital Transformation Leaders Game

The game simulates life in a fast-driven business environment, where participants need to scan and interpret data from their environment and combine different leadership capacities to form effective coalitions.
The game uses card elements, creative team challenges, physical prototyping materials with video and digital learning tools, to create an immersive and powerful learning experience.

“We are constantly looking for new and more effective ways to teach theoretical concepts and models. We now know that gamification leads to the faster and better absorption of knowledge. So, while you can explain these kinds of models, which we do, during the game the participants actually get to experience what we mean in practice.” — Stijn Viaene, Professor of Digital Transformation, Vlerick Business School

We created Digital Transformation Leaders game to engage participants in a dynamic, fast moving, situation-driven experience which prepares them to respond to the challenges of digital transformation. The game has now been played by hundreds of corporates in in-company programs and is an integral part of the offer for executive education at Vlerick.

What did Vlerick people say about Leaders Game?

“What I loved? The fact that we were confronted with new information and challenges over and over, making the game quite unpredictable yet so realistic. After the game, we immediately decided to put the theory into practice!” — Oliver Regidor, Digital Transformation Programme Manager at Argenta

“One of the good things about the game was that this fictional company operated in an industry completely different from the one I work in. This made it easier to think outside the box as you don’t feel constrained by what you know. Mind you, at times it was quite challenging and, dare I say, chaotic because the context changed faster than it would in real life. Then again, in reality, you often don’t get much time to asses a situation and make decisions either.’’ — Elisabeth Østreng, consulting engineer at Statnett, the Norwegian TSO

+BONUS: How to maximise learning impacts in corporate training and executive education? Check out our participative and engaging learning games here

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