Micro Business Game is a highly interactive training for microentrepreneurs and for all people who want to learn in practice how the success and sustainability of start-ups and small businesses can be improved.
Objectives of interactive training:
- Gain basic business skills and an understanding of the factors that influence business success.
- Understand the meaning of entrepreneurial thinking and acting.
- Learn how to further develop very small and small enterprises and discover challenges and opportunities on the way forward.
- Understand basic accounting and controlling principles and apply simple financial tools.
- Develop a better understanding of customers and acquire basic marketing know-how.
- Realise market dynamics and competition.
- Understand the interface between microfinance institutions and clients and realise implications.
Setup of the Micro Business Game:
In this haptic board game, the players are entrepreneurs who run a small fresh juice shop. During the training, they form teams that need to deal with various incidents and events. They encounter opportunities for business growth but also experience challenges in their role as employers. Furthermore, they have to handle business risks and seize development opportunities. The players literally take money into their hands and move it across the board over four rounds of the game. In the process, they deal with various topics such as financial education, business management and investment-driven market expansion and borrowing.
Lessons learned:
- Increase financial and entrepreneurial knowledge about starting a small business and getting it run by understanding basic accounting principles and applying simple financial tools like sales forecasts, cash-flows, balance sheets and profit and loss statements.
- Understand the role of different business stakeholders like suppliers and customers, lenders, and regulators, defining goals and strategies for dealing with each stakeholder.
- Learn to identify new business opportunities by entering new markets or introducing additional products.
- Manage unexpected events and risks, plan investments and work with financial institutions and their products.
- Together with experienced trainers complex situations are analyzed, decision options and best solutions are actively discussed in groups and being set against real business practice.
Training of trainers:
The general approach to rolling out this training follows this sequence:
- A training for local multipliers (“training of trainers”) is performed by experienced international trainers.
- The ToT is followed by an application of the training material in practice where trainers form teams of two multipliers to lead the first courses for start-ups and small entrepreneurs.
- The local multipliers attend a workshop for advanced trainers to exchange their experience as trainers and a follow-up training session, at the end of which a special trainer certificate is handed over to each trainer.
The experience-based learning approach:
The overall objective of the Micro Business Game is to experience how to manage a Micro Business effectively, using an experience-based approach.
The learning process is characterised by four phases:
- The participants are subdivided into groups, each group assumes the leadership of a business, take management decisions and gains an insight into internal and external factors that influence the performance of their business (Do).
- The participants receive feedback and reflect their progress within the simulation as well as their own actions (Reflect).
- The participants apply their newly acquired knowledge during the training (Apply).
- In transfer sessions, the simulation encourages the participants to implement their newly acquired skills in their business practice (Implement).
Languages and experience:
The material is available in various languages and can be translated and produced in any local language. The material is tried and tested in many courses and cultural contexts all around the world.
For more details about the Micro Business Game, visit our HQ website.
