Abstract for: Strategic Resources Investment Planning for Growth and Development: An executive training model

A lack of Resource Based View (RBV) effective understanding in strategy courses and a quick feedback learning style of the new generation of Business Administration students demand more than a traditional lecture teaching strategy. Based on two educator research questions: How could my students achieve an effective understanding of the RBV concepts? How could my students experiment quick financial impacts of their strategic decisions? and one student question: How could I develop strategic resources in order to achieve the maximum Cash Flow?, an Interactive Learning Environment (ILE) is proposed with the following learning objectives: understand the RBV concepts, identify relationships between strategic resources and financial performance and experiment the financial impacts of several resource development strategies, as an iterative process. The proposed ILE is tested based on a laboratory experiment that was conducted with the participation of graduate and undergraduate students to evaluate some key performance measures differences due to student investment strategy profiles between these two groups. The experiment results suggest that graduate students were more aggressive, getting worst results at the beginning but, at the end they achieve better results with some less aggressive strategy plus assigning more resources to productivity versus capacity than undergraduate students did.