The Informatist is a new site that allows high school and college students from around the world to participate in a fairly realistic business simulation that is both fun and a great learning experience.  This new environment is similar to massively online games and virtual reality environments, such as Second Life, Halo or Doom; unlike these environments, the student can learn a good deal about business in an engaging, interactive way.

Teaching Business Experience.

The Informatist (www.informatist.net) teaches business instincts as much as it teaches business techniques.  Most business thinkers argue that success in business is a matter of developing a 'gut instinct' for making the right decision.  As one professor put it, "it's about making a good decision with very little data."  Another says, "it's better to make a bad decision quickly than a perfect decision over a long period of time."  This kind of thinking is foreign to those in other disciplines, such as law or science, where the exact right decision is expected of the practitioner.

Business simulations online must reflect this complexity and lack of perfection.  One isn't searching for 'the' right answer—one is looking for solutions that are simply better than those around them, that are better than the competition. 

This need for the best good decision can be illustrated in a story:

Two men are in the woods in their bare feet.  As they are out in the morning doing their ablutions, they hear the roar of a bear nearby, and soon see the bear break out into a run, coming directly for them.  The two men of course take off running as fast as they can.  When they get to their clothes, one stops to grab his running shoes.  The other says, exasperated, "you can't outrun a bear.  They can run thirty-five miles an hour, climb trees, ford streams!  It's impossible to outrun a bear!"  His friend looks at him as he finishes tying his track shoe, and says "I only have to outrun you…"

Business is like that guy putting on track shoes.   The best performance may not be perfect, but it beats the competition.  Business simulations like the Informatist teach students how to compete with the resources they have.  This valuable lesson comes to the student in a way that is fun and easy to do.