Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

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This lesson shows that innovations can be viewed as filling gaps in the competitive landscape to better serve customers. 10. Innovation Challenges Draw a large circle around the smaller three, and label it “Constructive Tension.” This is for ideas on how a rep can use tension to their advantage. Free ideation and brainstorming can be great when starting a creative process but without further direction or refinement, those ideas can get lost in development hell. This creative thinking framework from Hyper Island is a means to not only start generating ideas, but to iterate, develop and select the best. I believe that projects should be fun. When projects are fun, people share their best and most innovative ideas. I am very thankful that my team leader introduced me to the book Gamestorming, a playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers. As an agile coach for a software development team, it’s important for our team to learn how to collaborate, support our customers on making judgments about priority and requirements, and to keep improving the product and the team. As I have started to learn more about project based learning, I realized that the ideas from Gamestorming may be helpful to teachers and education leaders. As teachers, how do we really engage students in the work of their projects? As education leaders, how do we encourage innovative teaching that creates life long learners and encourages students to be creative? If we want creativity to be a part of our education system, we have to practice this art. Why don’t we practice this craft of creativity through games? Customers are excited about the result that they can create with your product or service and they will tell you about it.

Have you ever thought of bringing people into your company and watching them build your product for you, then sell it to you? If you played “Build a Product Box,” you might just see this happen, in ways you might never have imagined. This is why business strategy games are vital for innovation. This lesson shows that ideas for innovations can come as we scan outside publications about trends, technology, and R&D news. 7. Visioning Ask your customers to describe the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly moments when they use your product or service. Clearly, include guidelines to make sure they think about all moments such as beginnings and ends of time periods, recurrent events or one-time events. Finally, collaborate to develop new innovations by combining the inventions with their values from the second column. Surely, this is the main challenge of the preparation of this game: “outrageous” features should be extreme enough to provoke cognitive dissonance, but not so extreme as that customers reject the game.

In teams of 3–5, groups should draw X-Y axes on paper. A product category should be chosen for the groups (e.g., restaurants, theaters, grocery items, etc.). The groups should identify two attributes that consumers consider important when buying that product. The axes should be labeled with the two attributes. Next, groups should plot all the competitors on their map according to how they are perceived by consumers. By looking at the open spaces or considering new attributes or axes, participants may see new possibilities for products and services.

Ask your customers to draw other products and services that they consider as related to your product. Enable you to get the rational about the way customers use your product or service and their underlying needs. On the contrary, a secondary market search reuses data previously collected for other concerns, to try to answer a question. Containing system – stakeholders of the system, even if they don’t directly interact with it (ex. Service technician) To get to truly exciting, creative, and out-of-the-box ideas (and have some fun!), try these 5 innovation games in your next brainstorm: 1. 100 uses for…

Trading cards– In a learning and innovation environment, it’s important for your players to build rapport with each other. This is a pretty easy ice breaker game. Here are 10 games that I have used with my teams. For project based learning fans, I hope you can imagine yourself using these ideas to inspire the creative skills of your students. For leaders, I hope these games help inspire a spirit of innovation with your teams.

These creative techniques tap into the idea of using frameworks and rules to help shape and inform a creative process. They can be especially useful if you’re helping a group start to use creative thinking at work and they’re uncertain about how to begin. Fruit party is a fun innovation game that can be used to teach a variety of innovation themes, from the importance of generation and combinatory innovation to the idea of there being “no bad ideas.” IDEO often begins their ideation sessions by asking “How might we…?” For this exercise, put challenge questions at the top of large index cards, saying “How might we” as the start to a number of various problems you want the group to consider. Give a card to each participant and ask them to write an idea for solving that problem beneath the question. Each participant should then pass the card to the next person. Each time a participant receives a card, they should try to build on the ideas already written, if possible. After a few passes, ask participants to write a wild idea to then keep passing and building upon the written ideas. At the end, favorite cards should be shared with the group. You can use each step of the Market Opportunity Navigator as a separate game, depending on your objectives. For example: When all of the notes have been posted, collaborate to identify how the ideas can enhance your project. What can be changed? Could you improve your project by simply eliminating any of the “dislikes”? Encourage participants to come up with solutions for the problems they presented.Once all the notes are on the chart, work as a team to negotiate the locations and descriptions. Those that are closer to the “BOLD” end of the continuum are more compelling and effective. Revolutionary sales experts Matthew Dixon— Managing Director of the Corporate Executive Board’s Sales and Service Practice— and Brent Adamson— Senior Director of the Sales Executive Council— have developed an insightful technique to help organizations develop customized sales strategies. In their book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, they describe one of the most effective types of sales professionals: The Challenger. These people are able to confidently teach, tailor, and take control while leveraging constructive tension to their advantage throughout the sale. Take advantage of this game’s visual organization — as illustrated in The Challenger Sale— and extensive collaboration to identify how to balance the aspects of this technique. It’s worth mentioning that creative thinking and creativity in general doesn’t just mean being able to draw, paint or write. Being a creative thinker means being able to see things from different perspectives and try new and creative approaches to solving problems, generating ideas and working with others. You can apply a creative approach to most tasks, challenges and roles and see better outcomes as a result. This thought process is extremely powerful for companies seeking to understand and leverage their landscape of opportunities. The ‘big picture’ that it provides is especially valuable for: