Threats & Trade-offs: A Start-up Simulation Game for Cybersecurity and Innovation Decision-Making

Abstract Cybersecurity is now critically important in an increasingly digitized and connected world. In addition to required digital security, individuals and organisations pursue multiple other objectives under binding resource constraints. Understanding how they make decisions in the face of these trade-offs is important for both research and teaching purposes. Games can create effective and exciting learning environments and also provide an immersive and experiment-based research setting to understand decision-making. We present a novel tabletop board game which sets cybersecurity in a broader organisational context and emulates real life business decisions. It can be used as a powerful research tool to understand decision-making about cybersecurity in a resource-constrained and uncertain environment. It is also a useful interdisciplinary educational tool, integrating concepts from cybersecurity, business development, and innovation management in gameplay.