For Educators
The Slingshot is designed for educators teaching entrepreneurial strategy in nascent industries, technology venturing, innovation management, technology commercialisation and university-industry interaction. It builds on the attention-based view of the firm (Ocasio, 1997): attention is the scarce resource, and the game's central tension is allocating it between competing goals, building internal capability while engaging the outside world that holds the resources a venture needs. 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.
🏆 Run a class tournament — Trajectory
Trajectory is built for educators as much as for students. Set up a class session in under a minute to get a join code; students enter it when they start the game. You then see how your class did as a group, which choices were most popular, and how your class compares with others — at zero cost, with no accounts, no software and no personal data captured.
Set up a class session →Learning Objectives
🎯 Strategic Decision-Making
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.
💰 Entrepreneurial Finance
Students experience venture funding dynamics firsthand: evaluating funding options, understanding dilution and valuation, negotiating with investors, and choosing between bootstrapping and venture capital paths.
🚀 Technology Commercialization
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.
⚖️ Trade-offs and Constraints
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.
Concepts Covered
The simulation exposes students to 21 core startup and innovation concepts. Click any concept to learn more.
The Slingshot in Action
Since launching on 14 January 2026, The Slingshot has been played by more than 1,900 people in 60 countries, and adopted in university classrooms around the world.
It is now used in entrepreneurship and innovation courses at universities across the UK, Europe, Australia and Latin America — see below for the places where we have engaged directly with faculty.
Players find it genuinely challenging, and early attempts often fail — which is exactly why Version 2 adds a gentler Seed mode to help newcomers build confidence. The difficulty is part of the appeal: much of the satisfaction comes from cracking a hard problem and improving run by run.
“Overall, a very positive experience.”
One early adopter set the game over the two weeks before class, then ran a comparable in-class round with everyone in the same sector so strategies could be compared. Pairing more game-minded students with others worked well — slowing the gamers down to reflect, and broadening the others’ sense of priorities — and the session opened rich discussions on dealing with uncertainty, resourcing a startup, and the simple rules founders fall back on.
— an entrepreneurship educator at an international business school
“Students loved it, and it gave great insights for discussions and literature connections. Thanks a lot for generously sharing with us all!”
— a faculty member
The Slingshot was built by an educator using AI tools rather than a software studio — which is part of why it is free to use, can evolve quickly, and is shaped by classroom needs rather than commercial ones.
Early adopters
We are grateful to the early adopters who have shaped The Slingshot through their use of it, their feedback and their support. It has been used in class at the University of Warwick, the University of Bristol, the University of Bath, the University of St Andrews, Imperial College London, Copenhagen Business School and the Technical University of Munich, whose faculty have both used the game and provided feedback and support.
We see The Slingshot as a shared teaching practice as much as a simulation tool. Many of the most valuable ways to use it will be some distance from our own experience, and we would like to gather and share them: how you framed the game for your students, how you ran the debrief, how you aligned it with an existing course or built a new one around it, any additional materials you developed, and how you integrated it into your class.
This is a community project, and we would love to hear how you have used it. Sharing your approach helps other educators and shapes where the project goes next; thoughts on the game itself are welcome too, though it is your classroom practice we are keenest to learn from. Tell us how you used it, and if you engage with the team we will gladly add your institution to this list of early adopters.
Using it in class
Early adopters use The Slingshot in many ways, and most cost nothing to set up — across undergraduate, postgraduate and executive courses:
- Add a link on the course page — zero adoption cost: nothing to install, no accounts and no fee, with students playing in the browser in their own time.
- In place of a reading — an experiential alternative to a case or textbook chapter, picked up in the next class.
- A single 90-minute class with a group debrief comparing strategies and outcomes.
- A common starting point — give everyone the same opening, such as the same sector and funding choice, then compare and contrast the different paths students take.
- An assessed individual reflection on the choices students made and why.
- Team play — small teams play together, arguing through decisions, solving problems and learning from one another, often with plenty of laughter; they can also compete through Trajectory.
- Alongside a sector mini-case — play the sector, then read how a real company in it (Darktrace, Sylvera, Robin AI, Multiverse, Synthesia, Lendable, Wayve or Isomorphic Labs) navigated the same terrain.
- Multiple plays — replay with different sectors or strategies and compare outcomes, drawing out how context shapes strategy.
Students also relish the bargaining the game involves — haggling with staff over wages, with funders over term sheets, and with one another — so negotiation and trade-offs run right through the experience.
Introduce it with The Slingshot Zone
A swipeable, TikTok-style taster of the game — thirteen short cards that show students what they're in for, in the format they already live in. Put this QR code on a lecture slide, give the room ninety seconds to swipe, and the game introduces itself.
Preview the Zone →Frequently asked questions
What is The Slingshot?
A free, open-source simulation of founding and running an AI startup, built for teaching entrepreneurship. Players run a UK AI venture quarter by quarter across four years, completing milestones before money or time runs out.
Is it really free?
Yes. Playing the game costs nothing, for students, educators and anyone else. The Educators Pack is also free. There are no accounts to buy, no per-seat licences and no premium tier.
How long does a session take?
A game takes twenty-five to forty minutes, depending on a player's knowledge and experience with the game; returning players are quicker. That fits inside a single teaching session with time left for a debrief, or works as preparation before class.
What do students need?
A modern web browser. Nothing to install, nothing to pay, no accounts to create. The game sets no cookies and holds no student data; the only things that leave the browser are anonymous, aggregate play counts and an optional, opt-in leaderboard.
What courses and levels does it suit?
Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial strategy, innovation management, technology venturing and technology commercialisation, at undergraduate, postgraduate and executive levels. The three modes (Seed, Core, Extreme) let you match difficulty to the cohort.
What do students learn?
Entrepreneurial strategy in a nascent industry, where markets, categories and rules are still forming and there is rarely a single right answer; strategic decision-making under uncertainty; entrepreneurial finance, including runway, dilution, term sheets and non-dilutive grants; technology venturing and commercialisation, turning advanced technology into a business; university-industry interaction, engaging the science base that sits upstream of a deep-tech venture, deciding whether to publish or protect, and building university partnerships; managing investors, regulators, customers and partners; and learning through failure and structured reflection.
How does it compare with other entrepreneurship simulations?
The Slingshot is free and open source, runs in the browser in twenty-five to forty minutes with no setup, is grounded in published research on AI ventures and the UK ecosystem, and comes with a free Educators Pack. Educators should judge any simulation against their cohort and learning objectives; those attributes are what The Slingshot offers.
Is it based on research?
Yes, in both its theory and its content. The game builds on the attention-based view of the firm (Ocasio, 1997): attention is the scarce resource, and the game's central tension is allocating it between competing goals, building internal capability while engaging the outside world that holds the resources a venture needs. That tension is also the question of the ESRC-funded project behind the game, Profiting from Science (ES/X003949/1), which studies how AI ventures form, grow and engage the science base. Its market-entry system embeds the Where to Play framework (Gruber and Tal, 2017), and its 550+ events draw on the literature on technology venturing.
Who built it?
The Slingshot was created by Ammon Salter (Warwick Business School), with Stefano Baruffaldi (Politecnico di Milano) and Federico Bignone (Warwick Business School), using AI-assisted development tools rather than a software studio. It is an open, not-for-profit educational project, built and maintained by a small team alongside their other work, and licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Can I use it for assessment?
Yes, through reflection rather than results. Game outcomes make a poor measure of learning, because the game has a strong degree of randomness by design and a result reflects luck as well as judgement. What the design supports is a reflective essay: every run ends with a report, a PDF the student keeps, recording the venture's history, and students write about the choices they made during the playthrough, why they made them, and what they would do differently. That reflection is naturally the student's own. Only the student knows why they chose as they did, and the game's detailed mechanics are deliberately hidden, so the insight in a good essay comes from having played and thought, not from anything that can be looked up. The Educators Pack includes assignment ideas built exactly this way.
Is it fun?
Yes. Students find it challenging and enjoy the challenge; some have played it thirty times. The mini-games add variety to the experience, and provide some surprise and delight during play. As one Master's student put it, “it was a fun and motivating way to experience how business decisions are made under pressure.”
What are the mini-games?
Three hands-on mini-games sit inside the simulation, each a key business activity experienced rather than described: working a conference booth to generate leads, delivering a thirty-second investor pitch to venture capitalists, and engaging visitors and closing deals under time pressure at demo day.
Can students play in teams?
Yes. A team of two to four can share one venture and make every decision jointly, which turns each quarter into a strategic argument, over hiring, funding, markets and pivots, of the kind a real founding team has. A class can also run a shared challenge: everyone starts from the same conditions and races to build the next AI unicorn, the game's ultimate prize, with a shared join code making the cohort its own anonymous leaderboard.
Can students play competitively?
Yes, in three senses. Inside the game every venture races three named rival firms in its sector. Between players, Core mode includes live competitive benchmarking, so students can compare their run against their class and against everyone who has played, and educators can run zero-cost in-class tournaments with no registration and no personal data captured. And players can compare themselves against themselves: benchmarking across their own earlier runs makes improvement visible from one replay to the next. Seed switches benchmarking off so beginners can learn without it.
Is it accessible?
Accessibility work against WCAG 2.2 AA is ongoing and expected to complete by autumn 2026.
How do I cite it?
Salter, A., Baruffaldi, S., & Bignone, F. (2026). The Slingshot: An AI Startup Simulation. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20749017
How do I get the Educators Pack?
Email ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk. It is free.
The Educators Pack
Everything you need to teach with The Slingshot — and to assess what students learn from it — comes in a free Educators Pack, built to save you preparation time: companions that explain every system, a ready-to-teach slide deck, ready-to-use assignments and quizzes, classroom exercises and discussion prompts, real-company cases, and two AI assistants, all mapped to clear learning objectives. Drop it into a single session or build a whole module around it.
The full pack is free to any educator. We keep it behind a quick request simply to keep these educator tools with educators and so we can support you — email ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk with your institution and course and we will share it. It contains:
📘 Companions
A Players’ Companion and an Educators’ Companion explaining the game, its systems and the thinking behind them.
🚀 Quick starts
Short student and educator quick-start guides to get a class playing quickly.
📝 Assessment & assignments
An assignment bank, a multiple-choice quiz question bank, and a educator fact sheet.
💬 Classroom use
Classroom integration exercises, discussion topics, and a learning-objective mapping grid.
📂 Sector mini-cases
Short real-company cases that pair with the game’s sectors — Darktrace, Sylvera, Robin AI, Multiverse, Synthesia, Lendable, Wayve and Isomorphic Labs.
🤖 AI assistants
Two assistants — one for players, one for educators — described in full below.
🖥️ Lecture slides
A ready-to-teach Educator slide deck for introducing The Slingshot and running a session around it.
Every item in the pack is released under the same licence as the game — Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). In plain terms, you are free to use, copy, redistribute and adapt the materials for non-commercial educational purposes, subject to three conditions: Attribution — credit the authors and note any changes you make; NonCommercial — no commercial use without the authors’ permission; and ShareAlike — any adaptation must be released under the same licence. These terms cover the game and every document in the pack alike.
Share and share alike
The pack is free and always will be. All we ask is share and share alike: once you've taught with the game, send me something for the next person who tries it. A story about how your class went, something a student said, an assignment that worked, a feature you wished it had, or a post telling colleagues what you did, anything is welcome. Everyone who contributes is added to the contributor list in the game itself, and, if you'd like, featured in the Playbook too. The best ideas find their way into the next version. It's how the games get better.
Sector mini-cases
A major part of the pack is a set of short, classroom-ready cases on real AI companies — one for each of the game’s eight sectors. Each pairs with playing that sector: students make their own calls in the simulation, then read how a real company navigated the same terrain and compare. They work as pre-reading, as in-class discussion, or as the basis for an assignment, connecting the game’s experiential play to real-world strategy.
The mini-cases are part of the Educators Pack — request access by email (see above).
AI assistants
Two AI assistants come with the pack, each grounded in the game and its materials rather than the open web — so their answers stay accurate to how The Slingshot actually works.
🎓 Educator assistant
Ask how to fit the game into a session or module, what the materials cover, how a mechanic works, or how to frame an assignment or debrief — a fast way to prepare without reading the whole pack first.
🎮 Player assistant
Helps students understand the game’s systems and think through their strategy, answering questions in plain language as they play. Open to everyone — launch it here.
The Player assistant is open to everyone. The Educator assistant is shared with educators on request, as part of the Educators Pack.
Technical Requirements
✅ Simple Setup
- • Web browser only (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge)
- • No installation required
- • No student accounts needed
- • Works on laptops, tablets, desktops
⏱️ Time Commitment
- • 25-40 minutes to complete one game
- • 10-15 minutes for brief debrief
- • 30-45 minutes for deep debrief
Social & Collaborative Learning
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.
👥 Team Play & Discussion
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.
🎮 Interactive Mini-Games
The simulation includes three interactive mini-games that create memorable, hands-on experiences with key business activities:
- 🎪 Conference: Work your booth at an industry conference. Click on delegates walking by, use swag and coffee to attract attention, run demos for serious prospects. Learn about budget management and lead generation under time pressure.
- 🎤 Investor Pitch: Deliver a 30-second pitch to venture capitalists. Keep the attention meter high, time your demo for maximum impact, read investor reactions. Experience the intensity of pitching for funding.
- 🚀 Demo Day: You have 60 seconds as visitors approach your booth. Engage leads to see their value, match offers to preferences, choose wisely between quick interactions and expensive demos. Practice prioritizing high-value opportunities.
These mini-games make abstract concepts tangible and create memorable decision moments that students can reflect on during debrief sessions.
💬 Sharing Experiences
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.
🏆 Friendly Competition
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.
Research Foundation
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:
- • Analysis of 550+ real startup events and decision points
- • Research on AI sector dynamics and competitive patterns
- • Studies of venture funding processes and term sheet structures
- • Empirical findings on early-stage team formation and dynamics
Created by Ammon Salter (Warwick Business School, University of Warwick), with Stefano Baruffaldi (Politecnico di Milano) and Federico Bignone (Warwick Business School).
Contribute
If you teach with it, we would love to hear how. We are glad to credit and share what works, and you are welcome to contribute exercises, cases, assessments or translations under the same open licence, with credit to you. Word of mouth and shared experience are what keep a free, community project like this going. Using The Slingshot isn’t buying a service — it’s joining a community of educators building it together.
Tell us about your course and how you use it: ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk.