Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

Product Information

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. Show and Tell: Participants bring in examples of artifacts created or modified by the product or service. Participants explain why these artifacts are important, and how and when they are used. Give them an amount of money that is low enough for them to focus on priorities and to pool their money for features. Usually, total money distributed is between 1/3 to 2/3 of the total cost of all proposed features.

Ask the players if any initiatives are missing from the wall. If so, request that they write them down, post them, and discuss their benefits so that you can capture them. Ask the players to take a few minutes to identify the benefits and desired results that might be available through focusing on a particular pole. They can write these on the diagram or use post-it notes (one per thought). Have each player present their post-its to the group. Spider Web: A product name appears at the center of a circle drawn in the middle of a whiteboard. Participants draw other products and services, explaining how, when, and why they are used. Participants then draw lines that link these additional services to each other and to the product's circle. At last, ask them to draw lines between the different products and services and highlight important relationships.This lesson encourages teams to use every conceivable idea members offer to reach the target number. This also teaches the value of building on other ideas. 5. iWish Here’s a little secret: anyone can innovate. While there are those select textbook geniuses who work hard every single day to create industry-shaking innovations, many of the best ideas come from “regular” people who just thought: What can I do to make this process or idea better/easier/faster? The game works best if you can facilitate general agreement around the benefits and resist the temptation to let the group waffle on prioritizing. They must make the hard decisions. And when the going gets tough, take heart: the players who resist ranking the most may also offer a wealth of insight into the initiatives and ultimately help the players better refine the final ranking. Create a list of potential features and provide for each a price. Surely, the price is the development cost. What matter is the relative cost between features.

A Dogma action has multiple steps, and is the heart of the game. This represents your civilization turning its main focus to one of the innovations it has adapted. A core part of creating an innovative new solution to a challenge is to look at it from a different perspective. I use this innovation game with teams all the time as way to clarify their thinking on an issue. A team was having a discussion about the new employee onboarding process and was getting bogged down trying to generate features, workflows and concepts. Giving them 5 minutes to generate and share what the onboarding process should “always be like” and then generating what it should “never be like” made a clear visual word and concept map that sparked features, workflows and concepts more easily. 5. Franken Ideation

As the players to identify which benefits and hazards are alive in the system by highlighting them. Use both qualitative and quantitative data to guide your responses. At last, learn more about innovation with all my posts about Digital and the disruptive technologies. Y-axis: “Where to Play.” This measures the novelty of your customers. Will the innovation serve an existing, enter an adjacent, or create a new market?