Teaching with Business Simulation Games: Identifying and Overcoming Hurdles to Adoption

Business simulation games (BSG) have grown in higher education use, yet many instructors, particularly in several management disciplines, have never taught with them. This article investigates why faculty refrain from adopting BSG and what institutions can do about it. Building on survey-based prior research, the author conducts focus groups with 11 experienced academics at a College of Business in the United Arab Emirates, drawn from disciplines including management, accounting, finance, business law, and economics. The discussions are coded thematically and analyzed for the intensity and specificity of participant comments, and the findings are then mapped onto a change management framework adapted from a Harvard Business Publishing simulation.

Participants uniformly recognized the pedagogical benefits of BSG, such as greater student engagement and links to workplace practice, but had not adopted them. Obstacles were grouped into suitability, resource, and risk concerns. Suitability worries centered on a perceived lack of games fitting introductory or localized courses and misalignment with learning objectives. Resource concerns were dominated by faculty time required to identify, prepare, and adapt courses, alongside license fees and administrative processes. Risk perceptions, including student frustration and the difficulty of evaluating unsuitable games, were amplified by time scarcity. A notable finding is that time constraints appear to be a prerequisite that shapes how faculty perceive suitability and risk, rather than a separate barrier.

To address these obstacles, the study identifies levers grouped as resources, information and training, and organizational changes such as incentives, flexibility in course consistency requirements, and inclusion of BSG use in faculty evaluation. The author argues that low-cost organizational measures that encourage experimentation may be the most effective route to adoption, with more directive measures appropriate only where administrative power or urgency is high. The single-institution, small-sample design limits generalizability, a limitation the author acknowledges.