Designing a Non-Digital Game for Entrepreneurial Education: Case Study of Biznes na Medal

This paper presents a three-year autoethnographic case study of "Biznes na Medal," a non-digital board game for entrepreneurial education designed by Mateusz Lewandowski at the Jagiellonian University in Poland. Its central argument is that the game's educational and commercial value emerged from iterative, bottom-up testing, and that a deliberate pivot from an abstract business setting to a concrete small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) context strengthened both its learning outcomes and its market potential. The development path ran from a 2022 prototype, tested with students, family members, and business experts, through to a 2025 final form shaped by university and technology transfer funding, incubator support, and feedback from workshops and school pilots.

The study's principal findings rest on pilot testing conducted in 2024 and 2025, in which 86% of pupils expressed a desire to play the game again. The game went into production, was distributed to the university, and became commercially available online from March 2026. To interpret the simultaneous roles that designers and learners occupy in such projects, the author proposes the ICEL framework, comprising Innovator, Creator, Entrepreneur, and Leader, grounded in organisational ambidexterity theory and focused on the tension between exploration and exploitation.

The scope is narrow by design: the evidence derives from a single Polish case and the author's own reflections, so the framework and satisfaction figures should be read as illustrative rather than generalisable. The work is anchored in literature on serious games, game-based learning, and business education, including the EMERGO development methodology and multi-aspect evaluation frameworks for educational games, positioning the case within ongoing debates about how non-digital games can support entrepreneurship education.