Education ‘Made-in-China’: a 5-day Experience of Being an Entrepreneur

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 26, 2019 / Having become the world’s second biggest economy, China is exerting larger influences in the field of politics, technology and business. Yet, people’s view on Chinese education is still largely concerning its rigid rules and examination oriented system. As the society calls for creativity and individuality nowadays, more advanced educational tools have been developed, offering possible answers to the transformation of Chinese education.

9 Feburary 2019, 400 of both Chinese and foreign students from more than 150 high schools gathered in Shanghai, to participate in an international business challenge, the FEUTURE International Business Challenge (FIBC). In the next 5 days, they were going to join two “simulated countries”, namely Touriman and Suketo Star, form their own teams, play the role of either startups, simulated governments or news media, and try to maximize their own benefits (as measured by the currency unit of the game) through operation, exchange and trade activities. In this mini-version of modern economic society, sophisticated business terms were reduced into apprehensible factors, and an online platform was used to pass along market data as well as generate market results.

Elections of the simulated governments

Memorable stories happened everywhere during the simulation. Si Ran, a participant from High School Affiliated to Beijing Normal University, said: ‘We didn’t do well at all for the first Fiscal Year. Our revenue couldn’t cover our costs; a well-designed product was sitting in our inventory for the whole time; we even signed an unfair contract with a distributor. As the CEO of our team, the pressure I felt was tremendous. But I wouldn’t give up so easy. After much deliberation, I realized what went wrong. Then I gathered my teammates, we discussed the whole night through. We decided to overthrow the previous strategy, to renew our production plans via calculating the rate of return and analyzing market supply and demand, to restructure almost all of our sales channels. Our effort turned out well, I’m so proud of myself and my team.’

Negotiations during the competition

Founded in 2011, the FIBC has become the largetst business simulation competition held in mainland China. The designing concept of the simulation is different from that of traditional ERP simulation used in most business schools and corporates’ employee training programmes. The main difference being that, in FIBC simulation, challenges do not come from computer modeling, but from the real activities of other participants.This generates a highly interacive environment; participants need to deal with not only the internal matters of their own team, but also the ever-changing business environment caused by decisions of other teams. Beside mainland China, FIBC also established divisions in Australia, New Zealand, Cananda and the U.S.

An online trading system is developed for the simulation

“It’s a game-like experience, but it’s not just a game.’ said Junwei Xing, president of FIBC. ‘It helps prepare the students themselves for the upcoming challenges of study and work. Students were to be tempered in the furnace of this dynamic business world, and to survive this they not only need to be familiar with textbook knowledge, but also need to chew on the need-to-knows of a real world: people’s relations, incentives, trusts and betrayals. They could see what entrepreneurship is all about, also the perspective and strong mindset one has to equip so as to follow their fathers’ and idols’ step. In short, it’s a ‘learning-by-doing’ process.”

Beside the competition itself, there were also many business lectures given in between. Yu Zuo, a graduate of Peking University, taught a lesson about ‘career planning based on Standford design thinking class’. Jiayi Zhu, a doctorate in Economics at Yale University, shared her up-to-date knowledge of modern finance industry.

One of the winning teams of the competition

On the evening of 12 Feburary, an awarding ceremony was finally held. After carefully evaluating the students’ performances on a number of criteria, some teams and indivisuals stood out, entitled seperately by the awarding committee the award of ‘Best Simulated Government’, ‘Best Manufacturer’, ‘Best Distributor’, ‘Outstanding Company’ and ‘Outstanding Personal Performance’.

Closing ceremony

‘We have a set of rigorous evaluation criteria, and we take them seriously.’ said Shuai Hao, academic supervisor of Feuture Business Challenge. ‘We’ve created an semi-open simulation as it is, students can choose to act good or bad, but we need to carefully monitor what the contestants are doing. To encourage a world of wisdom and virtue, is where our intention lies at.’

Apply@feuture.cn

SOURCE: FIBC

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