Waterloo has no business school. Its Arts and Business courses are booming anyway.

Designing a course is hard enough. Designing a business course at a university with no business school, for students who never signed up to be in business, is a different problem entirely.

That was Geoff Malleck's assignment. A Continuing Lecturer at the University of Waterloo, he was asked to build a series of courses for the Arts and Business program, and his hardest challenge was a split audience: humanities-minded students and entrepreneurial-minded ones, in the same room.

A business program without a business school

Business isn't a major. It's a way of thinking.

What tool could teach liberal-arts majors marketing, finance, accounting, entrepreneurship, and strategy, without turning the course into the very thing they'd avoided? Malleck's starting conviction was that the skills mattered for all of them.

Capsim still had an application to students that are not in business, because they're going to get jobs that require business acumen and knowledge.Geoff Malleck, Continuing Lecturer

Less textbook, more doing

He wanted the principles to come alive in a way that engaged a creative classroom, not another set of readings. After a long search, one description kept fitting.

I was looking for something that was less strategy out of a textbook and more "get your hands dirty."Geoff Malleck, Continuing Lecturer

A Capsim business simulation fit the course he was designing. It arrives late in the program, right as students prepare to enter the workforce, so the skills stay fresh exactly when they need to articulate the value they bring.

A suite for soft skills, not just strategy

Malleck didn't stop at one tool. Students run a company in the Capstone simulation, work through CapsimInbox modules on ethical decision-making and time management, and use TeamMATE to sharpen collaboration, then present on the concepts they practiced. The mix pushes initiative, critical thinking, time management, teamwork, and communication all at once.

Anna Lennox, a former student who grew up on a farm, already understood how one decision ripples through an organization. The simulation gave that instinct somewhere to work.

The fact that I was involved in every component of the decision-making in Capstone was great. It related to entrepreneurial aspects, because even though we were working with hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, it boiled down to responsibility.Anna Lennox, former student

Enterprise-ready, not commodity

Malleck measures success differently. He wants graduates who can walk into a job and carry their weight, and stand apart while doing it.

We want to graduate highly skilled, enterprise-ready, mature, and motivated students. We don't want commodity graduates, everybody looking like Grade A large eggs.Geoff Malleck, Continuing Lecturer

The proof shows up in two places. The Arts and Business courses have grown into a boom Malleck calls "unusual" for the arts, spread across at least four sections of sixty students, and he credits the simulation-based approach for it. And his graduates tell him they draw on what they practiced when it counts most, in the interviews that decide what happens after school. For Malleck, that last one is the measure that matters.