Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

Product Information

With tangible objects and the stories your participants make up w/ them you’ll get so much richer inputs and context to inform joint visioning / strategizing:

Corporate relationships: connections between your company and other companies to identify potential partners then improvement opportunities.The real question is, “how can you get the teams in your organization to not only be more innovative, but to also feel more comfortable sharing their innovations for the benefit of the organization as a whole?” Imagine your product is a person. What’s its name? What would its ideal date night be? Does it prefer the beach or the woods? This exercise is a playful way to nail down the essence of your idea, product, or service. Use it in ideation or as a way to hone an existing concept.

Like the Ten Commandments, Min Specs are enabling constraints: they detail only must dos and must not dos. You will eliminate the clutter of non-essential rules, the Max Specs that get in the way of innovation. Often two to five Min Specs are sufficient to boost performance by adding more freedom AND more responsibility to the group’s understanding of what it must do to make progress. Out of their experience in the field, participants shape and adapt Min Specs together, working as one. Following the rules makes it possible for the group to go wild! The Creativity Dice Actually, it is a good practice to prepare customers before the game by telling them that some of the features will be “funny” or “outrageous”. Vision: Several potential product features appear on a shuffled set of note cards, one feature per card. The facilitator tapes the first card face-out onto the wall and displays each of the remaining cards one at a time to the participants, asking if the feature on the card is more or less important than the feature on the wall. No two features are allowed to be of equal importance. Vision is about asking players to thoughtfully evaluate priorities as a group. The first phase of the game—describing and capturing the benefits—is significant because it lays the groundwork for the hard part: determining priorities. It can be challenging to get a group to rank its projects, all of which seem important in some way. Find real, everyday examples of innovation to briefly share among the group. Some of the best discussion comes from bad examples that participants don’t believe will succeed. Participants should share why they believe the innovation will succeed or fail.

The Creativity Dice #creativity #problem solving #thiagi #issue analysisToo much linear thinking is hazardous to creative problem solving. To be creative, you should approach the problem (or the opportunity) from different points of view. You should leave a thought hanging in mid-air and move to another. This skipping around prevents premature closure and lets your brain incubate one line of thought while you consciously pursue another. Six Words This tool is designed to help critical thinkers focus on a core idea by writing a short phrase summarizing their thoughts into a set number of words that are clear, concise, and accurate. This idea is based on a complete short story written by Ernest Hemingway: “For sale, baby shoes – never worn.” Six Words forces people to synthesize their ideas in a succinct and meaningful way, cutting away fluff and distilling the idea to its bare essence. Idea & Concept Development s– As your project team considers creating a new product or service, this game helps your team think about decomposing the problem.

Finally, use the Navigator in combination with other great tools to set a promising strategic path: Mitch Lacey Team Prioritization– For any project team, it’s often useful to consider the question “what should we do that will generate the most value with the smallest amount of complexity?” This game encourages your project team to arrange ideas on a 2d space. On one axis, you have complexity.( low to high) One the other axis, you have value(low value to high value) By placing ideas on this grid, it’s often easy for your team to spot the next logical steps. After all the notes are complete, collaborate to identify how to use these ideas to customize the perfect message for the customer. 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.

Ideation and Concept Development is a process for groups to work creatively and collaboratively to generate creative ideas. It’s a general approach that can be adapted and customized to suit many different scenarios. It includes basic principles for idea generation and several steps for groups to work with. It also includes steps for idea selection and development. Six Thinking Hats An easily accessible and comprehensive overview on gamification and games in the context of innovation and entrepreneurship A team-building activity in which groups must work together to build a structure out of LEGO, but each individual has a secret “assignment” which makes the collaborative process more challenging. It emphasizes group communication, leadership dynamics, conflict, cooperation, patience and problem solving strategy. Telling Our Stories 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?