Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

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Innovation Ambition Matrix was inspired by the May 2012 Harvard Business Review article, “Managing Your Innovation Portfolio,” written by Monitor’s revolutionary co-partners: Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff. The productive game helps teams develop a holistic view of how to get ahead by organizing initiatives and goals based on three innovation levels: core, adjacent, and transformational. Play Innovation Ambition Matrix to clarify the ambition of a project, develop a cohesive operation rather than a scattering of competing advancements, and identify how to balance your team’s effort allocation. innovation management at Design School Kolding, Denmark. He has been a project leader of several projects at various national innovation networks. As well, he is project leader on international EU projects focusing on strategic Approaching problem solving or ideation in a new way or from a fresh perspective is a hallmark creative skill. It’s not always easy to bring this kind of creative thinking into the workplace, and so creative games that can help us tap into metaphorical or perspective-shifting frames of mind can be especially helpful.

With a strong understanding of both the firm’s capabilities and potential customer problems, discuss with the players different applications stemming from these abilities, and different types of customers who may need them. Summarize these on the lower part of Worksheet 1. 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.

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All teams are a bastion of knowledge and insight that doesn’t always surface. Some workshop formats, working practices or personality types aren’t great conditions for everyone and so finding a low-impact way to share knowledge and best practices can help everyone contribute and share knowledge in a way that works for them.

You can play this game with anybody related to your project. Ask customers what they like/dislike about different aspects of your product or service. Or, collaborate with your key partners to determine if your relationship is going according to plan. This activity is adaptable to your needs and can be customized for any audience. For further organization, you can draw arrows between personas to identify who communicates with whom; doing so will reveal the tangle of relationships originating from the system and bring attention to distant customers who use the output of the product. Play Customer-Centric Online Use the framework to guide you through future situations that arise within the tension of the polarity. Y-axis = “Priority” to designate the urgency of the task. This can be measured by anything the players agree is important, such as ROI or business value. Simply drag the note card icons to the squares and describe the concerns they represent. Then, players can drag the faces to the chart to organize the positive and negative aspects of the concerns.Connecting with an idea, product or service on a personal level isn’t just a creative way of thinking – it can help improve connections with team members too and job satisfaction too. This creative thinking game tasks a group to create a persona for the product, idea or experience and build a dating profile to match. Top = “Teach for Differentiation” – insight that reframes how a customer may see their business and needs

Once the brainstorm is done, ask the players to put their notes on the wall. Ask for volunteers to sort the notes into meaningful categories (see Affinity Map). Discuss what these categories might mean for your company and products. Finding space to introduce more creativity into the workplace yields benefits for both organizations and individuals. Not only can it improve outcomes and create innovation, but it can help managers and employees communicate more effectively and improve job satisfaction too. Thanks a million to Oddie, Oran and Artur for a great demo today – the team really enjoyed it! With all the Zoom fatigue going around it was great to exercise our brains with the Digital Global Innovation Game. It was executed impeccably and gave us a great way to innovate and engage with the team. 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. One misconception about creativity is that it best functions when we are given complete freedom. Often, it can be creatively energizing to be given a framework or ruleset to work with and around, rather than being given free reign. Think of how hard it can be to approach a blank piece of paper, rather than responding to a prompt or question.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. 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. Effective planning is often about correctly identifying what can help you reach a desired goal and assigning tasks to help your team reach that goal. With this creative thinking technique, your team will explicitly consider the gap between your desired future state and current position and brainstorm all the things that contribute to creating the gap between your current and desired positions.