Business Informatics Students Compete in Business Strategy Games

A team from the Faculty of Business Informatics participated in the Business Strategy Games organized by McGraw-Hill, one of the world’s three largest educational content publishers and a leading provider of interactive teaching and learning tools globally.

The BSG simulation games organized by McGraw-Hill are among the leading educational tools in strategic management, as they rely on live simulations of running global companies in a competitive environment that mirrors real-world conditions. This approach helps develop decision-making skills and long-term strategic thinking.

EUI’s team was among 21 teams in the final rounds, representing 12 countries. The teams were divided into three groups, competing to devise the best strategies for managing global companies through live simulations.

Prof. Ahmed Hamad, Acting President of EUI, stated that business strategy games are an important mechanism for preparing senior corporate leaders. Such competitions help sharpen the skills of those aspiring to work in executive management positions, which seek talents capable of long-term strategic thinking to maximize company profitability and market value.

He explained that McGraw-Hill’s games emphasize the importance of understanding the interconnected relationships between corporate functions, such as finance, marketing, production, and human resources. They provide a safe educational platform to learn from both successes and failures in live simulations, enhancing financial and business acumen as well as adaptability to market and competitive changes.

Prof. Hamad added that business strategy games are among the best educational tools, offering a dynamic virtual environment to apply management concepts and theories in scenarios that mirror the real world, while developing decision-making, market and competition analysis, teamwork, risk management, and understanding the impact of corporate social responsibility on financial and operational performance.

Prof. Mohamed Saleh, Dean of the Faculty of Business Informatics, emphasized that these games provide practical training for future managers, giving participants the opportunity to lead a company in a complex simulated environment and handle high-risk decision-making pressures.

He explained that the university team was selected following an internal competition involving 9 teams at the university level, all of whom completed the BSG simulation exercise. The top-ranking team was chosen to participate in the international competition, which is held three times a year—in May, August, and December—each cycle lasting two weeks.

This year, the university team included students Ali Ahmed, Hoda Ahmed, Shahd Khaled, Zainab Khaled, and Nour Yasser, all third-year students in the Faculty of Business Technology, supervised by Dr. Menna Allah Abdullah, with the participation of teaching assistant Shadi Shaker.

Dr. Mennatalla Abdulla, the team supervisor, noted that the competition organizers divided the participating teams into three groups. EUI’s team competed in the first group, which included teams from universities in Egypt, the United States, Canada, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, and the Philippines.

Each team develops a package of strategic decisions over a two-week period, covering ten rounds. Performance is evaluated according to multiple criteria, including earnings per share, return on equity, stock price, credit rating, and corporate social responsibility, with analysis of the decisions’ impact on industry, market, production, sales, and financial indicators, all within a comprehensive framework of interactive teaching and live simulation.