Strategy & Management · Competitive Strategy

Designing the Distinctive Offer — Reposition ELBS Against Institut Concorde

A four-round, advanced strategy simulation set inside École Lumière Business School (ELBS), a private AACSB-accredited business school in Montpellier, France (2,800 students, €62M revenue, a thin 8% operating margin, 140 faculty).

4 rounds Executive English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

A four-round, advanced strategy simulation set inside École Lumière Business School (ELBS), a private AACSB-accredited business school in Montpellier, France (2,800 students, €62M revenue, a thin 8% operating margin, 140 faculty).

On 5 June 2026 a far richer rival, Institut Concorde, announces a €20M 'Sustainable Business & AI' master with aggressive scholarships and a global campaign — aimed squarely at the high-potential segment ELBS hoped to grow. The board demands a credible repositioning plan within ten weeks.

ELBS is stuck-in-the-middle: nine me-too programs differentiated on nothing, a Differentiation Index of just 42/100, and one genuinely valuable, rare and hard-to-imitate capability — a respected faculty specialism in sustainability and impact management with faculty depth for only one or two flagships.

Playing the Dean with a fixed €6M strategic-investment budget, you (1) run a VRIN capability analysis to separate true sources of distinctiveness from commodity offerings and read where Concorde is strong and where it is not; (2) choose where to compete and what to STOP doing — concentrating the €6M on three or four programs to cross a differentiation threshold rather than peanut-buttering it across all nine; (3) design a defensible flagship built on owned capability rather than matching Concorde's discount, and decide whether to retain the lead sustainability professor Concorde is poaching; and (4) defend a viable, distinctive strategy to the board chair, reconciling differentiation with positive operating margin and a resilience stress-test.

The scoring rewards genuine strategic-capability design and punishes the five classic errors — starting a spending war, peanut-butter allocation, over-extending the one capability until it is just a label, claiming a position ELBS cannot deliver, and a beautiful flagship that loses money. Final KPIs track the Differentiation Index, Segment-fit, Operating margin (€), and Competitive resilience against the €6M cap.

Who it is for

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • Which of ELBS's assets is genuinely Valuable, Rare and Inimitable (VRIN)?
  • Where is Institut Concorde genuinely weak, despite its €20M war-chest?
  • How candidly does your team admit ELBS is stuck-in-the-middle and must stop being everything to everyone? (%)
  • How do you concentrate the €6M across your portfolio?
  • How many of the nine programs do you discontinue or harvest to free resources?
  • Allocate the €6M strategic budget across these levers (must total €6.0M, in € millions)
  • What position does the flagship claim against Concorde?
  • Pick the differentiators Concorde cannot easily copy (choose the set, not the discount)
  • Concorde is poaching your lead sustainability professor. What do you do?
  • Capability-retention investment (research chair, lab, PhD lines) — € millions

What participants track

What participants follow on screen as the rounds go by:

  • Differentiation, Fit & Resilience Trajectory

Subjects covered

Designed for courses in Competitive Strategy.

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