Apr 30: Blue Market Challenge: the latest Immersive Learning Experience from Excelia Business School, focussing on the issues of water to train students to identify risks before a crisis arises
Designed for Year 3 students on the Bachelor in Business programme at Excelia Business School, the Blue Market Challenge is the latest Immersive Learning Experience (ILE®) that places students in a future world where water management is regionalised and privatised. Taking on the role of consultants for a company in the water sector, they are required to analyse a market, identify weak signals, make decisions under pressure, and defend their choices considering issues of sustainability, social acceptability, reputation, and potential crises. This immersive experience enables students to learn strategic marketing through an approach that places emphasis on recognising risks, building trust, and making responsible decisions.
Realistic fiction to learn how to anticipate risks
Forming part of strategic marketing teaching, the Blue Market Challenge immerses students in a context dominated by environmental, economic, social, and political constraints. Students have to recommend setting up a business in one of three regions—Brittany, Occitania, Île-de-France—each with its own unique issues and challenges (social tensions, unknown quantities, conflicting information). They must prioritise the signals, assess the risks, and make trade-offs in an uncertain environment. This experience sheds light on highly relevant contemporary issues, such as sustainability, resource governance, social acceptability, and reputation, in the context of responsible marketing and crisis management. Strategic foresight, as a pedagogical approach, serves to demonstrate that strategic marketing is not only about ‘selling’ but also about anticipating trends, positioning the offer, managing reputation, and building trust. Furthermore, thorough market research helps identify threats before they turn into crises.
Three stages: observation, analysis, decision-making
The Blue Market Challenge is split into three key stages. First, there is an introductory tutorial to familiarise students with the regional implantation options. Next, they prepare their analysis during an immersive session (20-25 minutes), where they are placed in a real-life business situation: a strategic meeting, searching for clues in a technical room, organising information using PESTEL and SWOT analysis tools. This leads up to a final decision which each student then defends at the end of the simulation, during a group debriefing. Beforehand, they will have already put in place preparations for the anticipated crisis, including a communication protocol and a press release. The progression of the experience is part of a broader educational approach, focussing on observation, interpretation, decision-making, and reasoning.
Another innovative experience by Excelia Business School to transform learning
Designed by research-active Faculty member Ludivine Destoumieux, with support of Excelia’s Digital Learning & Innovation team, the Blue Market Challenge is part of Excelia Business School’s strategy to transform learning and develop Immersive Learning Experiences (ILE®). This learning-by-doing approach aims to train students to develop a thorough understanding of contemporary transformations, drawing on diagnostic tools, and to cultivate their decision-making and reasoning skills in uncertain contexts.
“Through the Blue Market Challenge, we wanted to put students in a situation where they learn to spot weak signals, identify risks, and make decisions without possessing all the facts. Experience consistently shows that a thorough Marketing analysis provides invaluable insights into market dynamics and helps prevent crises.”Ludivine Destoumieux, research-active Faculty member, Excelia Business School
“This latest immersive experience clearly demonstrates Excelia’s ability to combine academic expertise with technology to create realistic simulations with very specific educational goals. In the case of the Blue Market Challenge, the goal is to develop responsible decision-making skills in an environment of uncertainty, to justify those decisions, and to observe their effects in real time, all whilst raising student awareness of the challenges of water governance.”Caroline O’Neill, Head of Digital Learning & Innovation, Excelia
Initial launch in Tours and then La Rochelle
The Blue Market Challenge, which was launched on the Tours campus back in late February and then rolled out in La Rochelle in early March, is aimed at Year 3 students on the Bachelor in Business programme. This latest ILE® is part of the Blue Education Experience, an educational initiative designed to explore the ecological and social transition from the perspective of water. As a tool for raising awareness, it enables students to understand the challenges of global warming and recognise the need for economic, organisational, social, and ecological transitions.
