The Slingshot is designed for educators teaching entrepreneurship, innovation management, strategy, and technology commercialization. The simulation provides students with hands-on experience navigating the challenges of building an AI startup, from founding through scaling.
Free, open-source, and grounded in real startup experiences, The Slingshot can be integrated into courses at undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive education levels.
Students learn to make resource allocation decisions under uncertainty and time pressure. They balance competing priorities across product development, customer acquisition, operations, and team building while managing limited cash runway.
Students experience venture funding dynamics firsthand: evaluating funding options, understanding dilution and valuation, negotiating with investors, and choosing between bootstrapping and venture capital paths.
Students navigate the specific challenges of commercializing AI technology: managing technical risk, achieving product-market fit in fast-moving sectors, and competing in markets where technology capabilities evolve rapidly.
Students grapple with fundamental entrepreneurial trade-offs: growth vs. profitability, product quality vs. speed to market, equity vs. control, and short-term survival vs. long-term positioning.
The Slingshot is flexible enough to support multiple pedagogical approaches:
Students play individually before class. The game provide a guided play and tutorial, so student can effectively play on their own. You can follow up with in class discussion or not.
Best for: Understanding language and nature of startups, and their environment
Students play individually or in small groups during class time. Follow with structured debrief comparing strategies and outcomes.
Best for: Illustrating specific concepts like resource allocation or funding decisions
Students play on their own time and submit reflections on their decisions, strategies, and outcomes.
Best for: Deeper engagement with strategy formulation and reflection on entrepreneurial decision-making
Teams compete to achieve the best outcomes. Create leaderboards and have teams present their strategies and results.
Best for: Generating energy and engagement, encouraging strategic thinking and peer learning
Use alongside traditional case studies. Students play the simulation then discuss real startup cases, comparing their choices to actual entrepreneur decisions.
Best for: Connecting experiential learning with real-world analysis
Students play multiple times with different sectors or strategies, then compare outcomes and reflect on what they learned.
Best for: Exploring how context shapes strategy and understanding path dependencies
Complete guide for running the simulation in different class formats, including suggested discussion questions and debrief frameworks.
View on GitHub →Complete course module including pre-simulation reading, in-class activities, and post-simulation debrief.
View on GitHub →The Slingshot is designed to spark conversation, debate, and shared learning. While students can play individually, the richest learning often emerges when students engage socially with the simulation.
Students can play in pairs or small groups (2-4 people), making decisions together. This creates natural opportunities for debate about strategy, risk tolerance, and priorities. Groups often discover they have different intuitions about what matters most—and these differences drive learning.
After playing, teams can present their strategies and outcomes to the class, explaining their choices and what they learned. Comparing different approaches reveals there's no single "right" path to success.
The simulation includes three interactive mini-games that create memorable, hands-on experiences with key business activities:
These mini-games make abstract concepts tangible and create memorable decision moments that students can reflect on during debrief sessions.
Create a shared class experience by having students play the same sectors or compare outcomes across different sectors. Students learn as much from seeing what happened to others as from their own journey. The personalized end-game reports provide concrete starting points for these discussions.
While not the primary goal, light competition can boost engagement. Create leaderboards by valuation, revenue, or other metrics. Students enjoy comparing results and understanding why different strategies led to different outcomes.
The Slingshot was developed as part of an ESRC-funded research project (ES/X003949/1) exploring entrepreneurship education and innovation management. The simulation is grounded in:
Developed by Ammon Salter (University of Warwick), Stefano Baruffaldi (Politecnico di Milano), and Federico Bignone (Politecnico di Milano).