Licence

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The simulation and all associated materials — the game itself, Ada and Schumpeter, the educator pack (companions, slide deck, assignment bank, quiz bank, classroom exercises, mini-cases), the Trajectory Wizard, website content, event and scenario text, character narratives and documentation — are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Under it you may:

• • Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
• • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material. Translations, new ventures, new events, reskins for other industries and cut-down classroom versions are all welcome.

Attribution (BY)

Give clear and prominent credit: name the authors (Ammon Salter, Warwick Business School, with Stefano Baruffaldi, Politecnico di Milano, and Federico Bignone, Warwick Business School), include the citation below, state the licence, and indicate any changes you made. The credit belongs in the work itself — an about screen, a title slide or the document's front matter — not only in accompanying materials.

The credit is the citation. Citations are how the development team gains credit for this work, so if you use the game in teaching, a syllabus, a talk or a publication, cite it as you would any other source.

NonCommercial (NC) — free educational and research use

No permission or payment is needed where the primary purpose is teaching, learning or research. You do not need to ask; we do like hearing how it went. Free uses include:

• • Undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes
• • In-class sessions, seminars, tutorials and assessment built on the game
• • MOOCs and open online courses
• • Summer schools, pre-sessional and outreach programmes, including schools and colleges
• • Student competitions, societies, enterprise programmes and hackathons
• • Dissertations and student projects that use or study the game
• • Teacher training and educator development
• • Self-directed learning by individuals for personal or professional development

Research use is free in the same way, and welcome:

• • Studies of entrepreneurial learning, decision-making and simulation-based teaching that use the game
• • Collecting journey reports or play data from your own students as research data, under your institution's ethics approval
• • Adapting the game as a research instrument — controlled scenarios, treatment and control versions, added measures
• • Replication, methods teaching and doctoral training

NonCommercial (NC) — what needs a separate licence

Any context where the simulation helps generate fees or revenue:

• • Executive education charged to participants or their employers
• • Corporate training and staff development programmes
• • Consulting engagements that use the simulation with clients
• • Paid workshops, bootcamps and accelerator programmes with fees
• • Reselling, sublicensing, or bundling the simulation into paid products or services

The test is whether the simulation is part of what is being sold. Degree teaching at a fee-charging university is free educational use: students pay tuition for the degree, and the game is one of many things used to teach it. It is different when a course is sold and the simulation is included in it. An open-enrolment executive course, a company programme, a consultant's workshop: if the fee covers the session where the game is played, that needs a licence. If in doubt, ask.

If your case sits between the two lists, ask: ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk.

ShareAlike (SA)

Derivative works must carry the same licence, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, and stay available to others on the same terms.

No additional restrictions

You may not apply legal terms or technological measures — DRM, paywalls, registration walls — that legally restrict others from doing anything the licence permits.

Citation

Salter, A., Baruffaldi, S., & Bignone, F. (2026). The Slingshot: An AI Startup Simulation. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20749017

@misc{salter2026slingshot,
  author    = {Salter, Ammon and Baruffaldi, Stefano and Bignone, Federico},
  title     = {The Slingshot: An AI Startup Simulation},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.20749017},
  url       = {https://slingshotsim.org}
}

The game was developed as part of the ESRC-funded project "Profiting from Science: the development and valuation of Artificial Intelligence new ventures and engagement with the science base" (Grant ES/X003949/1).

Requesting a commercial licence

Email ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk with the intended use, audience and scale. Licences are usually simple: a scope (the programme, the audience, the period), a fee proportionate to the use, and the same attribution as everyone else. Commercial licences are handled by the University of Warwick.