Exorogame was co-founded by 5 National University of Singapore(NUS) students. Kenneth Tan is the CMO. They have devised a way for people of all ages to learn about Entrepreneurship through a hands-on, collaborative approach. Do read more about this upcoming startup based in Singapore here.

When was ExoroGame founded?

ExoroGame was first started back in November, 2005 as a flagship workshop project for the NUS Entrepreneurship Society as part of their local outreach program. We used prototype props to conduct the games. Response for the game was good, and we saw our product being widely adopted by many schools both local and overseas. We then decided it would be a great opportunity to spin this project off as a company in July 2007.

What is your long term vision with ExoroGame?

Our vision of ExoroGame is to become the Entrepreneurship pedagogical tool for every educational institution and corporate training company. So far, we have educational institutions who expressed interests in incorporating ExoroGame into their Economics curriculum as well as corporate trainers interested in having ExoroGame as one of their training components in their workshop packages. Hence, we believe that we are on our way towards our vision.

Where or who does ExoroGame get their funding from?

Besides contributing in funds ourselves, we got support from the National University of Singapore’s Funding scheme (FUSE).

Congratulations on your first ExoroGame competition success! Can you please tell us a bit about the competition?

In conjunction to our product’s commercial launch last month, we hosted a National ExoroGame Youth Challenge for the Junior Colleges and tertiary institutions in Singapore. This competition was organized with the First Ever National Youth Entrepreneurship Conference named, "The Next Generation of Entrepreneurs," which discussed the grooming of the next generation of entrepreneurs in Singapore. We were fortunate to have Mr. Ron Sim, Founder and CEO of OSIM International Ltd to be our Guest-of-Honor and panelist at the conference. We invited each school to send entrepreneurial students to participate in this challenge. This event would also serve as a place for these like-minded students to network with one another and create new sparks for the local entrepreneurial scene.

Reading the instructions alone on your site was not very clear on how a non-business or less economically inclined individual such as myself, could play ExoroGame successfully. How do people like me learn beneficially from the game? What aids do ExoroGame provide to be able to enhance my steep learning curve?

Before every workshop, we will carry out generic and specific briefings for the participants to be familiarized with their roles in the game. Our ExoroGame commercial set includes a training CD to facilitate participants in playing the game as well. However, the game is not as difficult as it is perceived from reading the web descriptions. In fact, most of the game participants were junior college and secondary school students who had zero or little background knowledge in business or economics. With the help of trial rounds in the game, most people can pick up after one session.

Is the startup currently profitable? If so, how many game sets have you sold?

ExoroGame was profitable since the first sale (game workshop using the prototype set) in 2006, and we had over 800 satisfied game participants, since then. The commercial game set was recently manufactured in July 2007, and to date, we have managed to sell 10 sets. Besides, we’re already in discussion with a few educational institutes in implementing the game in their school curriculum.

What is ExoroGame’s target market?

We are targeting budding entrepreneurs who want to experience realistic simulations of start-up company operations, organizations that seek introductory activity for recruitment, operations, and team-bonding activities, corporate HR departments who can use ExoroGame as part of their entry-level exercises to help identify attributes like adaptivity, teamwork, responsiveness, and management, and last but not least, education institutions. Academically, ExoroGame has been used as a conclusion exercise for Entrepreneurship and business courses because of its extremely objective scoring system. It can be implemented as part of the school curriculum for business-related courses such as economics, management, marketing, and entrepreneurship.