Capsim business simulations · Advanced
Capstone Business Simulation
Capsim's flagship. Teams run a company across five market segments for up to eight rounds, and every call they make in R&D, marketing, production, and finance lands on the same balance sheet.
Five-minute walkthrough of the starting scenario. Instructor and student support is included, and your first delivery is shadowed by a Capsim consultant.
On this pageWhere it fitsScenarioDecisionsObjectivesCompareFormatsScoringFAQ
- Level
- Advanced
- Market
- 5 segments: Traditional, Low End, High End, Performance, Size
- Products
- 5 to start, up to 8
- Rounds
- Up to 8 competition rounds (+ up to 4 practice); each round is one year
- Round length
- 60–150 minutes in a seminar; a week in a course
- Teams
- 3–7 per company (5 ideal); solo play with Comp-XM
- Industry
- 2–10 companies, human or automated
- Scoring
- Stars · Success Measures · Balanced Scorecard · Triple-Bottom-Line mode
- Best for
- Strategic management capstone, MBA strategy, leadership cohorts
Where it fits
The course that has to pull the whole degree together.
In the curriculum
Capstone is built for the strategic management capstone: students arrive with the functional courses behind them and leave having run a business that needed all of them at once. It carries the widest market (five segments), the full set of generic strategies, and every case module. It is the simulation most Capsim instructors choose.
- Strategic management and capstone courses
- MBA strategy and executive education
- Prework for an assurance-of-learning exam (Comp-XM)
- Sustainability courses, in the Triple-Bottom-Line mode
In corporate programs
Companies use Capstone to develop functional experts into enterprise leaders. A cohort runs the business in teams, faces competing teams, and finds out where its judgment holds under pressure and where it doesn't. Delivered as a facilitated program: one or two days onsite, or blended across weeks, with observers, peer feedback, and pre/post measures wrapped around it.
The scenario
A sensor company, five markets, and a map that never stops moving.
A government has broken up a monopoly into identical companies. Each team takes one. The company looks healthy on paper, but the monopoly hid its problems: a product that pleases no one in particular, capacity in the wrong place, a capital structure nobody chose on purpose. Teams fix what's broken while building an advantage the other teams can't easily match.
The product is a sensor. Deliberately generic, so no team arrives with an industry playbook and every team has to find out what customers actually want. Customers judge it on performance, size, reliability, price, and age of design.
The perceptual map is the board. Customers cluster into five segments on a map of size against performance: Traditional, Low End, High End, Performance, and Size. Each segment has an ideal spot, and the ideal spot moves every year toward smaller and faster. A product that is perfect today is obsolete in three rounds unless someone repositions it, and repositioning means a marketing plan, a production plan, and the capital to pay for both.
Six generic strategies are laid out for teams at the start: Broad Differentiator, Broad Cost Leader, Niche Differentiator, Niche Cost Leader, Niche Player, and Product Life Cycle. Any of them can win. Which one does comes down to execution against five other teams choosing at the same time.
Three forces make standing still a decision too.
- Competition. Every company starts with the same flaws, and the team that fixes them first pulls ahead.
- Industry growth. Segments grow at different rates, so capacity has to be bought before the demand arrives.
- Changing technology. Customers expect smaller, more capable products every year. A product left alone drifts out of its segment.
What teams decide
The decisions, function by function.
Decisions are set at the policy level, once a year, the way a leadership team would set them: a price is an annual average and capacity is a plant. Each function's decision limits what the other three can do.
Reposition, revise, invent
Move products toward the ideal spot, raise reliability, launch new ones. Every project takes time and money, and a product mid-revision can't be sold.
Price, promote, sell, forecast
Set price, promotion budget (awareness), sales budget (accessibility), and the forecast the rest of the company will plan against.
Capacity, automation, schedule
Buy or sell capacity, invest in automation, schedule production against the forecast. Capacity takes a year to arrive.
Fund it all
Issue stock, bonds, and short-term debt; pay dividends; keep enough cash that a bad forecast doesn't trigger an emergency loan.
Modules that raise the stakes. R&D is built in. HR (workforce recruiting, training, and turnover) and TQM (ten process and quality initiatives) are optional departments. Seven case modules can drop a strategic threat or opportunity into a running game, from Community Involvement in Round 1 to Basic & Applied R&D in Round 6. Instructors usually start with the base scenario and add one module per round as the competition unfolds. The nine add-in modules →
Learning objectives
What students can do when they've run it.
Capstone's objectives cover the strategy course end to end. Map them to your syllabus and to the outcomes your program reports.
- Strategic analysis. Assess the company and its industry with frameworks such as SWOT, PESTEL, and Porter's Five Forces.
- Business planning. Commit to a strategy: market position, source of competitive advantage, and where growth will come from.
- Sustainable business practices (optional). In the Triple-Bottom-Line mode, build a strategy scored on people, planet, and profit together.
- Cross-functional decision making. Make the calls in every function so that they add up to one strategy, for this round and the ones after it.
- Performance measures. Choose the indicators and targets that will tell the team whether the strategy is working.
- Implementation and execution. Turn a strategy into a sequence of funded decisions, and keep executing as competitors respond.
- Project management. Plan investments that take rounds to pay back, across functions, without running out of cash.
- Team development. Work through the stages of a team under deadline pressure, and lead through them.
- Change management. Redirect a company mid-course when the market or a module makes the plan obsolete.
- Communication with stakeholders. Present the company's mission, strategy, results, and decisions to a board, a class, or a client, in writing and in person.
- Assurance-of-learning prework. Refresh and integrate the whole curriculum before an accreditation exam such as Comp-XM.
How it compares
How the four simulations differ.
Every Capsim business simulation runs on the same platform: the same round cycle, the same reports, the same cross-functional decisions. Learn to run one and you can run them all. They differ in how much market there is to read and where the pressure lands.
| Simulation | Level | Segments | Products | Global markets | Scoring | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CapsimCoreFoundational, fully cross-functional | Beginner | 2 | 1–4 | No | Stars, Success Measures, Balanced Scorecard | Strategy fundamentals |
| CapsimGlobalA domestic company goes multinational | Intermediate | 2 | 1–4 | Yes | Stars, Success Measures | International strategy |
| CapsimOpsOperations in the spotlight | Advanced | 2 | 1–4 | No | Stars, Success Measures | Operations management |
| CapstoneThis pageThe comprehensive flagship, Capsim's most-used simulation | Advanced | 5 | 5–8 | No | Stars, Success Measures, Balanced Scorecard, Triple-Bottom-Line mode | Advanced strategy & capstone |
Choose Capstone when the course is strategy at full depth: five segments, six generic strategies, the widest set of competitive advantages to build, and every case module available to stretch it. A class new to business vocabulary, or a tight schedule, points to CapsimCore instead. International strategy points to CapsimGlobal, and an operations course to CapsimOps.
Formats and pacing
Formats, and how long each one runs.
Capstone is the reference pace for the family: a two-day seminar runs five rounds, a semester runs eight with practice rounds in front. The first rounds take the longest; by round six a team decides in an hour.
| Format | Length | Rounds | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two-day seminar | 2 days | Practice + 5 | Corporate business-acumen or leadership cohort |
| Blended seminar | 1 onsite day + 7 online sessions + wrap-up | Practice + 8 | Corporate universities, events, exec ed |
| Semester course | 13 weeks | Up to 4 practice + 8 | Strategy, capstone, and MBA courses |
| Module or quarter | 6–10 weeks | 1–2 practice + 6–8 | Compressed academic terms; two debriefs a week |
Onsite, online, or blended, and any class size from a single team to more than a thousand participants across sections. Sizing, coaching setups, and technical requirements: how a delivery runs →
How it's scored
The simulation scores the company. Comp-XM scores the student.
Company performance
Stars give a quick read each round. Success Measures let each team weight the eight measures that fit its strategy (cumulative profit, market share, stock price, and the rest) and be scored on its own terms. The Balanced Scorecard scores financial, customer, internal process, and learning-and-growth results each round plus a cumulative recap. In the Triple-Bottom-Line mode, people, planet, and profit are weighted equally, with sustainability decisions woven through R&D, production, HR, and finance.
Every round ends with automated debriefs and reports; a custom report builder lets you grade participation as well as results.
Individual evidence, for assurance of learning
Teams share a score, so team results can't stand in for each student's learning. Comp-XM closes that gap: each student runs the same simulation again on their own, then answers the board's questions, scored against the Big 7 learning goals. Four to six hours, individually. CapsimInbox-XM is the faster alternative: students interpret their company's report through a board-meeting inbox in one to two hours.
How Capsim measures the individual →You're never running it alone
What comes with the simulation.
Questions faculty ask
Frequently asked
How long does Capstone take?
You set the pace. A two-day seminar runs a practice round and five competition rounds. A semester course runs up to four practice rounds and eight competition rounds at one round a week. Each round is one year in the company's life.
Is Capstone 2.0 a different product?
No. Capstone is one product on one platform; the earlier spreadsheet-style edition has been retired. The current Capstone uses slider-based decisions, industries of up to ten companies, an alert system that warns teams before a bad decision, a required onboarding, and the Triple-Bottom-Line sustainability mode.
Do students need business courses first?
Capstone assumes the functional vocabulary of a business degree, which is why it sits at the end of the program. For students new to business, or non-business majors, CapsimCore covers the same cross-functional ground with a two-segment market and a faster start.
Teams or individuals?
Teams of three to seven, five ideally, in a tournament against each other or a footrace against automated competitors. Individuals run Capstone solo in Comp-XM, the assessment version.
How is it graded?
However you weight it. Stars and Success Measures score the company every round; the Balanced Scorecard adds a cumulative recap. For individual grades, pair the team result with Comp-XM or CapsimInbox-XM, which score each student separately, and use the report builder to grade participation.
Does it work with our LMS?
Yes. Capstone runs in the browser and integrates with Canvas, Blackboard, and the other major systems: single sign-on from the course and gradebook sync for scores.
Can students use AI to win?
They can use it, and the introduction should encourage it. Each team's position is the product of its own accumulated decisions in a market the other teams keep moving, so there's no generic answer to look up, and if five teams follow the same advice the sixth one wins.
Playing Capstone in your course?
Log in to your simulation, get help from support, or see whether your team qualifies for the Capsim Challenge.
See Capstone in your course.
A 30-minute demo, mapped to your syllabus or program. We'll show the round cycle, the reports, and how it's scored.