Innovation game

The phrase innovation game refers to a form of primary market research developed by Luke Hohmann where customers play a set of directed games as a means of generating feedback about a product or service. The research is primary because the data collected is gathered directly from customers or prospects and is intended to answer a specific research question. (Secondary research is data collected previously by others, usually through primary research, that may or may not address a specific research question.) “Customers” who play innovation games are commonly direct recipients or consumers of a specific product or service. In some cases, though, game players may be any person or system who is or would be affected by a product or service.

Innovation games are directed by a facilitator whose responsibilities include:

The successful operation of an innovation game relies on collaborative play among the participants and a set of observers drawn from disparate functional groups within an organization. For example, a typical game setting for a word processing software might include participants drawn from two or three corporate customers along with observers comprising the product’s quality assurance manager, technical architect, product manager, developer, sales executive, or any one else on the product team. Arguably, the most important observer is the product manager because that person is responsible for acting on the data generated by the game. However, a single observer cannot possible capture all of the nonverbal and nuanced communication that players exhibit, so all observers play a significant and irreplaceable role in the effective utility of the game.

A description of innovation games

There are at least 12 unique innovation games (and any number of new games derived by combining elements of these 12 games).[1]

Selecting an appropriate game

While any number or variety of innovation games may be invented, combined, or adapted from other game environments, all such games have strengths and weaknesses that constrain their applicability to specific kinds of problems. These strengths and weaknesses are expressed as six separate dimensions:

  1. the degree of open-ended exploration: how much or how little the participants are constrained in their interactions
  2. the degree of scalability: the number of customers who can play the game at any one time
  3. the degree of physical preparation: what kinds of supplies or materials are necessary to play the game
  4. the degree of market preparation: how much background effort is necessary to provide data or content for the game
  5. the degree of customer preparation: what pre-game activities, if any, to require of the participants before entering the game environment
  6. the time frame of action: how long after the game completes before the participant expects a product’s improvement to reflect the game’s results

See also

References

  1. See Luke Hohmann, Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products through Collaborative Play (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2007), 47-124.
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