Learning complex things by doing them.
We create business simulations and experiential learning programmes for universities, business schools and organisations around the world.
Innovation, entrepreneurship and strategy are difficult to understand from models alone. They involve uncertainty, competing priorities, incomplete information and decisions whose consequences only become clear later.
Rather than explaining complex dynamics, we let people experience them.
Experience before explanation.
Real business problems rarely have one correct answer.
Customers behave differently than expected. Strategies interact. Resources are limited. Competitors respond. And the information you would ideally like to have is usually incomplete.
A good simulation makes those dynamics visible. Participants can experiment, fail, adapt and try again — without the cost of doing so in the real world.
The result is not simply more knowledge. It is better judgement.
Make choices before you know every answer.
Test assumptions instead of defending them.
See how the system responds to your decisions.
Use what happened to make the next decision better.
Built between education and practice.
Innovative Dutch started with a simple question: could business education feel more like actually building and running a business?
That question led to our first business simulation and, over time, to programmes used in bachelor, master, MBA, PhD and executive education.
Since 2012, our simulations have been used across more than 25 countries, including at universities and business schools such as TU Eindhoven, Warwick Business School and Bayes Business School, as well as in professional and organisational learning.
The setting changes. The underlying idea does not:
People understand complex systems better when they can explore those systems themselves.
Not another case. A system to explore.
We develop simulations and programmes around entrepreneurship, innovation, customer discovery, strategy and business operations.
Some clients use an existing simulation as part of a course or development programme. Others ask us to adapt the experience around their own cases, learning objectives or organisational context.
Play
Ready-to-run simulations that place participants inside a dynamic business challenge.
Design
Customised cases, environments and learning journeys built around your context.
Learn
Structured reflection turns decisions and consequences into transferable insight.
They decide. They experiment. They interpret what happens. Then they decide again.
Different worlds.
One perspective.
Innovative Dutch was founded by Jan Spruijt, whose work sits at the intersection of higher education, organisational learning, innovation and simulation design.
Over the years, Jan has worked as an educational leader, programme manager, innovation manager and learning & development manager, alongside building Innovative Dutch.
That combination has strongly shaped the simulations: they are designed from an understanding of both sides of the learning process — what makes a programme educationally meaningful, and what makes a challenge recognisable in actual organisations.
Jan remains closely involved in the design and development of the simulations and regularly facilitates programmes himself. For larger programmes and international delivery, Innovative Dutch works with experienced facilitators and partners.
Schedule a call with Jan
Fun is welcome.
Thinking is required.
We are not particularly interested in making learning “fun” for its own sake.
We are interested in making it active, consequential and intellectually engaging.
A good simulation should make participants curious. It should reveal relationships they had not noticed before. It should create disagreement and discussion.
And ideally, it should make them want to run the experiment one more time because they think they can do better.
The game is not the learning objective.
It is the environment in which the learning becomes possible.