Every simulation we publish is designed to work for a wide audience. That is a strength and a limitation at the same time. The strength is accessibility: an instructor at a business school in Malaysia runs the same exercise as a corporate trainer in Brazil, and both find it teaches what it's supposed to teach. The limitation is specificity: the scenario was built for a plausible context, not for yours.
For most programmes, that gap is acceptable. For some, it isn't. And those are the clients we work with on custom development.
What Custom Means Here
Custom development at Eureka Simulations is not theming. It's not placing a client's logo over a standard interface or swapping product names to match an industry. Those are cosmetic changes, and while we can do them, they don't touch what actually determines whether a simulation is pedagogically useful: the decisions, the variables, the causal structure of the system participants navigate.
A genuinely custom simulation is one where the participant faces the decisions your context demands — not a useful approximation of them. That requires building from the architecture, not from the surface. For a broader view of where Eureka Simulations sits in the executive education market, see Navigating the Simulations Market for Executive Education.
What Gets Built, and Why It Matters
Scenario and Decision Structure
The most significant customisation is usually the decision set. Standard simulations choose which decisions to expose participants to based on what is most educationally universal. A custom build starts from a different question: what decisions do your participants actually need to practise making?
Consider a programme serving executives in a heavily regulated industry: the relevant decision is not generic market-share optimisation but pricing tied to compliance timelines, approval processes, and stakeholder dynamics that no off-the-shelf simulation contains. Or consider a supply chain programme where the learning objective is specifically about managing multi-tier supplier risk — not logistics in general, but the particular structure of decisions that defines that organisation's operational reality. The simulation teaches what you need it to teach because it was designed around those exact variables, not around a generalised approximation of them.
Financial and Market Structure
The numbers in a simulation carry meaning. When a participant sees a margin structure that looks nothing like their industry, or a cost breakdown that bears no resemblance to how their organisation actually operates, a layer of translation is added between the exercise and the learning. Custom builds remove that layer. The financial architecture reflects the actual economics of the client's context, which means participants spend less time decoding the simulation and more time thinking about the problem it is designed to create.
Branding and Narrative Context
A custom simulation can be set explicitly inside a client's world — their company, their product categories, their competitors, their strategic language. This is not about vanity. Participants engage differently when the scenario is not hypothetical. A leadership team running a simulation that mirrors their actual market conditions, their actual strategic constraints, and their actual competitive position is running a strategic exercise, not just a training one.
Language and Cultural Fit
Eureka Simulations runs in multiple languages, but language is not just translation. The examples, the cases embedded in the scenario, the framing of the decisions — all of these carry cultural weight. Custom builds allow clients in specific geographies to work with material that was genuinely designed for their context, not adapted from one that wasn't.
EXSIM: A Decade of Co-Development with IESE
EXSIM is one of the clearest examples of what sustained co-development between an institution and a simulation platform can produce. The simulation's roots go back decades — it originated at IPADE, IESE's sister institution in Mexico, where professors developed an early technology-assisted management game. IESE adopted the concept and, working closely with Eureka Simulations as the platform partner, transformed it into something qualitatively different: a full-week immersive experience in which MBA students and executive programme participants assume real directorial roles, make decisions across more than twenty reports per round, face live board members who scrutinise their strategy, and navigate crises — labour accidents, union disputes, unexpected market shocks — that the faculty introduces in real time.
The most recent edition ran with 226 participants across 30 competing teams. Alejandro Lago, IESE professor and one of the simulation's architects, describes the design logic directly: "I use that density of decisions as a tool to ensure that each executive is saturated and cannot spend time coordinating with the others. That is the lesson." When the final round ends, the standard joke among faculty is to announce that one more period has been added. The reaction in the room is always the same: relief mixed with something that looks like reluctance to stop.
EXSIM is available through Eureka Simulations for business schools and executive education programmes. You can read the full story in EXSIM: the simulation that made MBA students cry.
How the Process Works
Custom projects begin with a scoping conversation. We need to understand the learning objectives, the participant profile, the programme structure, and the specific constraints — time, technical, institutional — that will shape what we build. From there, we develop a prototype, test it with a pilot group, and iterate based on actual usage data and facilitator feedback.
The timeline varies by complexity. A scenario-adapted build with modified decision variables and custom branding can be ready in weeks. A simulation developed from the ground up around a proprietary business model takes longer, with the client involved at each stage of design review.
The client owns the result. What we build for you is not added to our standard catalogue. It's yours.
When to Consider a Custom Build
The right moment to explore custom development is when you find yourself explaining to participants why the simulation context is different from theirs — and when that explanation keeps getting in the way. If the cognitive overhead of translating a standard scenario into your reality is costing you learning time, it is a signal that the simulation should do that work instead of the instructor.
It is also worth considering when you have a specific strategic or pedagogical goal that existing simulations approach but do not quite reach. Our catalogue is broad — over forty simulations covering strategy, operations, finance, sustainability, leadership, and more. If something in it is close but not right, the question of whether to adapt or build is a short conversation.
The goal, in every case, is the same: a simulation that fits the programme so well that neither the instructor nor the participant ever has to stop and explain the distance between the exercise and the real thing. When that distance disappears, the learning takes over.
Looking for a simulation built around your exact context?
EXSIM is one example of what a long-term co-development partnership with Eureka Simulations can produce. If you have a programme that needs something built to fit — a custom scenario, a branded environment, or a simulation designed around your participants' specific decisions — we would like to hear about it.
Learn about EXSIM →
