The annual Master of Engineering Management Programs Consortium (MEMPC) PriSim Business War Games Competition concluded in March, with Dartmouth’s "Green Motor Company" finishing in second place. This year, Dartmouth was represented by four MEM'19 students: Abhishek Agarwal, Sadie Doran, Adithyan Karunakaran, and Poorna Suresh.

The Dartmouth 2018 team

The five-week virtual business simulation is run by the MEMPC and places students at the helm of a virtual automotive manufacturing company. The competition included students from 7 MEMPC-member schools, including Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Purdue, and the University of Southern California.

"We had the opportunity to participate in a StratSim Game for our Marketing course—and I think I can speak for all of us when I say it was the highlight of that class," says Doran. Despite having experience with the simulation, the team still faced challenges throughout the competition. As Karunakaran explained, "The biggest challenge that we faced was the uncertainty in market response to new product launches and product upgrades."

The Competition requires that participants leverage their technical skills and business acumen through seven decision periods. While the team had established a preliminary goal of being market leaders in microsegments with high revenue potentials, they found that their strategies had to evolve to remain competitive. Karunakaran noted that "with every decision period, we had to modify our approach to different aspects of the business such as product upgrades, marketing spend, financing capacity expansion, and launching new products based on competition activity."

Reflecting on the competition, Doran says that "Being interactive and fun, incorporating knowledge we have learned in class, and being able to compete with other MEM programs are all reasons I wanted to participate!"