ICE Cream Empire, Bocconi's Game for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Discover the secrets of entrepreneurship by selling ice cream cones . Understand supply and demand, inventory management , the secrets of promotion and a simplified income statement. This is what Università Bocconi offers aspiring young entrepreneurs around the world with ICE cream empire (ICE ), the strategic simulation game for smartphones and tablets. The game replicates the management of an ice cream stand and aims to familiarize young people with the interpretation of the competitive environment , reading a budget and understanding business reporting .
Starting November 8 , on the occasion of Bocconi Open Days, ICE Cream Empire can be downloaded for free directly from the app store or from the website www.icecreamempire.it
ICE, developed for ios and android, integrated and playable also on Facebook, is in English with eye-catching graphics . it reproduces the places where you can install your kiosk (Università Bocconi, Piazza Duomo, the Navigli Quarter, plus cities such as London , Moscow, Mumbai, Paris, etc. ). It allows you to experience a day as an entrepreneur which opens with checking the news ( predicted temperature , events that may affect flow of people to or from various places ) and continues with the corresponding strategic decisions .
The player decides where to put the kiosk, what equipment to buy, who to hire, the selling price of the ice cream, whether to invest in promotion, what recipe to use( tasty and expensive or bland but cheap ? ) and the quantity of raw materials, often perishable, to buy . Every decision has an effect both on outlay (causing immediate costs) and on revenue ( stimulating future sales).
The action unfolds before the eyes of the player, with passersby who stop (or not) to buy ice cream according to the soundness of the strategic decisions taken in the first phase, which may in part be run in real time thanks to the Marketing Mixer. The game creates , at day's end, a reporting suite that informs the player as to the day's gain or loss. So you can correct the course the next day on the basis of the experience you accrue.
"Our research suggests that involvement is a very important precursor of learning," says Luigi Proserpio, director of BETA , the Bocconi research lab that deals with processes and educational innovation.
"Simulations like ICE Cream Empire, especially among younger people, have the advantage of being an immersive experience that facilitates their involvement . And they also have the important advantage of speaking a language that these people are very accustomed to. Management theories and practices lend themselves well to a translation into simulations, because it is relatively easy to identify the variables that interact to make the game realistic. Of course, to maximize learning, games and simulations should be used as complementary tools to more traditional forms of teaching . "