This document provides an overview of innovation games and how they can be used to ignite change and build a culture of innovation within an organization. It discusses how innovation has become a critical topic for businesses facing increased competition. The document then outlines a process for using innovation games, which involve structured play, to help teams think differently and generate new ideas. This includes divergent and convergent thinking exercises. Finally, some specific innovation games are described that can be tried to help address problems and opportunities in a fun, engaging way.

1. Igniting Change
Discovering Innovation Games®
Andrea J. Simon PhD

2. Igniting Change
• How to ignite change?
• Build innovation into your organization?
• Create a culture that embraces change?
• Build an Idea Bank? Watch for the
possibilities?

3. Agenda
• Why Innovation is so hot a topic now?
• A process to train teams how to ―see, feel
and think‖ in new ways
• Active learning: do some innovation games
• Wrap with what to take away when you
leave
3

4. Great Playground
4

5. How does it feel?

6. Who Plays?

7. Everyone is talking about Innovation
WHY?
7

8. Innovation Problem

9. Stuck
• February 2011
• ―The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we
still don't have a product that is close to
their experience. Android came on the
scene just over 2 years ago, and this week
they took our leadership position in
smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.―
Stephen Elop
Nokia CEO

10. What has changed?
Business Process Creative Process
Same Result Every Time Different Result Every Time
A Structure for A Structure for
Predictability Possibility
10

11. Innovation
Not a linear process

12. Imagine you are Columbus
MONSTERS
INDIES FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
• Creative work is more like living with a
FUZZY goal…

13. Knowledge Workers are Different
Office in Zurich
Industrial Workers
• Expected to fit standardized job
descriptions
• Perform duties according to
clear procedures and
prescriptions
Knowledge Workers
• Expected not so much to perform
standardized routines but to
generate creative innovative results
that will delight customers and
colleagues

14. Has your business changed?
• What is your office designed for? Efficiency?
Creativity?
• Do you have an Idea Bank?
• What happens to idea to turn it into an Innovation?
• Does your team really embrace change?

15. ―I am not a creative person!‖
No longer acceptable to take this position. If
you are a knowledge worker you must become,
to some degree, creative.

16. Complex World: Essential
Whole Organizations need
to be Creative and
Innovative to…
• Empower people
• Solve every day problems
• Create big ideas that turn
into major transformations
• Stay competitive
• Grow

17. You don’t know what you don’t know
What we know
What we know we don’t
know: like how to fly a
plane or speak Japanese
What we don’t know we
don’t know—
EVERYTHING ELSE

18. Paradox of Discovery
• Find things you are not looking for when you
are not looking.
• But if you are not looking for something, you
will not find anything.
18

19. Where do those ideas come from?
Not where you
imagine

20. From Factories to ―Collaboratories”
20

21. San Jose ― Build a Better Budget‖
21

22. There is a process here
BUSINESS GAMES ARE NOT
VIDEO GAMES

23. Why People Games?
• Games involve a high level of emotion
• Emotions help us to
• Focus
• Remember
• Decide
• Perform
• Learn

24. Brain hates to Change
Change creates Pain
in the Brain
24

25. Randomness = Fool the mind
• The human brain is a pattern-making
machine. We seek and find patterns
everywhere we look. We’re so good at it that
once we find one, it can be difficult to see
anything else. Creating randomness is a
way of fooling the mind so that you can
more easily search for new patterns in a
familiar domain.
25

26. Steps to Innovation
WHAT IS THE STRUCTURE?
26

27. Creative Process
RULES
FACILITATORS +
OBSERVERS
GOALS
PLAYERS
TIME + SPACE
ARTIFACTS

28. Opening: Divergent
• Deconstruct
• Create an explosion of ideas and
opportunities. No critical thinking
or skepticism.
• Blue-Sky, wide and deep
• Energy and optimism
• Post-it note ―heaven‖
• Set the stage
• Develop the themes
• Build the ideas
• Pull in the information
28

29. Emergent and Exploring
Look for
patterns
• Start Exploring and Experimenting
• Look for Patterns and Analogies
• See old things in new ways
• Look at how something is used across time
and space
29

30. Closing--Convergent
Ideas
Bundles Move
Towards
Conclusions
Intersections
• Move toward conclusions
• Toward actions
• Be critical and realistic
30

31. Steps
Divergent Emergent Convergent
Goals
Ideas
Bundles Move
Towards
Conclusions
Intersections
• Set the stage • Examine • Conclusions
• Develop the • Explore • Decisions
themes • Experiment • Action
• Build the ideas
• Pull in the
information

32. How could this help you and your company?
LET’S TRY TO PLAY
32

33. Innovation Games
33

34. Product Box
Goal
• Identify the most exciting, sellable
benefits of a product with your
customers and non-customers.
.
How to play
• Imagine that you are selling your product, idea, … at a
tradeshow, retail outlet, or public market
• Take a few cardboard boxes and literally design a product
box that you would buy. The box should have the key
marketing slogans that you find interesting.
• When finished, pretend that you’re a skeptical prospect
and ask your customer to use their box to sell your
product to you
34

35. Speed Boat
Goal
• Find out what they don’t like about
your product
How to Play
• Draw a boat on a whiteboard or sheet.
You’d like the boat to really move fast.
Unfortunately, the boat has a few
anchors holding it back. The boat is
your system, and the features that your
customers don’t like are its anchors.
• They write what they don’t like on an
anchor. They can also estimate how
much faster the boat would go when
that anchor was cut. Estimates of
speed are really estimates of pain.
35

36. Prune Product Tree
Goal
• Build a product, vision, … according to
your plans
• New Ideas, Problem Solving, Planning,
Unraveling Complexity
How to Play
• Start by drawing a very large tree. Thick limbs
represent major areas of functionality within
your system. The edge of the tree – its
outermost branches – represent the features
available in the current release.
• Write potential new features on several index
cards.
• Place desired features around the tree.
Observe how the tree gets structured – does
one branch get the bulk of the growth? Does
an underutilized aspect become stronger?
36

37. Remember the Future
Goal
• Understanding how you get
to a goal
• Backwards
How to Play
• Open ended vs. Future event that has already occurred
What should the system do
• What will the system have done = Future event that has
already occurred
• Based on several studies in the field of Cognitive Psychology
Mentally generate a sequence of events that caused this
event to have occurred
37

38. Problem to solve
LOTS TRY SOME INNOVATION
GAMES
38

39. Common Issue
• How to address the health and
wellness of your employees
• Reduce costs
• Improve work productivity
• Positively impact society
39

40. Prune the Product Tree
• First, break into 3 groups
• Draw a tree
• Populate the tree from roots to
fruit with all the elements of
employee health and wellness
40

41. Prune the tree
• Discuss what is at each part of the tree:
• What are the essentials in the roots?
• The supportive trunk?
• The major and minor branches?
• The leaves?
• The fruit?
• Prune it so you have the most important for
that tree to thrive
• Discuss, debate and decide
41

42. Remember the Future
• You have the Tree, well
pruned
• You can make this happen in
3 years
• What is the Health and
Wellness Story that you have
built
• Remember how you get there
• Map out a 3 year timeline
• Going Backwards, remember
the major moments
• How did it feel when?
42

43. Remember The Future Backwards
Remember how we got there!
Define the
Future
2 Years 1 Year 6 Months 3 Months
Major
Milestones Partners
we formed
Obstacles we
overcame
43

44. Sustaining Change
FINAL THOUGHTS
44

45. Playing Games Works
• We know it sounds weird, at first: Playing
games to do work.
• Research shows that human beings have
been hard-wired to express themselves and
interact with each other through play.
45

46. Playing Innovation Games® helps you…
• Understand your customers’ needs
• Deliver the right features
• Make better strategy decisions
• Increase empathy for your customers’ experience
• Improve the effectiveness of sales and services
• Identify the most effective marketing messages and
sellable features
• Uncover breakthrough opportunities
• And have serious fun doing serious work!
46

47. Discovery
• The toughest part of innovation is accurately
predicting what customers want, need or will
pay for.
• Even if you ask them, your customers
probably can’t explain to you what they truly
want.
• And the typical brainstorming sessions,
surveys or focus groups just don’t produce
actionable results.
47

48. Play frees the mind
• That’s where Innovation Games comes to
the rescue. Playing Innovation Games® like
Speed Boat, Prune the Product Tree or
Product Box with your customers enables
you to tap into your customers’ needs and
desires through the magic of game play.
48

49. Shape
• Sometimes the hardest task isn’t the invention. It’s
not the discovery of new features or even
uncovering glitches in a well-oiled process.
• Hardest part: Wrestling with the mountain of data
that your discovery efforts have produced,
attempting to shape the information into a form
that can be ordered and acted upon.
• The game mechanics underlying Innovation
Games like Remember the Future cuts through
the tedium and enables you to find the bright
ideas, the breakthroughs.
49

50. Prioritization
• It’s not enough to know what features your
customers want; you need to know which
features are essential and which ones can
be tabled until the next phase.
• Innovation Games like Prune The Tree
makes setting priorities, trading off options,
really ensuring that your team is focusing on
the right features at the right time.
50

51. Act
• Playing games equals real work.
• Innovation Games aren’t practice, aren’t
simulations, but how leading companies are
doing real work every day.
• Discovering new trends
• Shaping and managing workloads
• Prioritizing new features or projects
• There’s a game to improve and enlighten
every phase of work.
51

52. How can we Ignite Change?
• Recognize that your brain hates change
• You have to do something to push beyond
the ―habit-trail‖ where you are most
comfortable.
• Innovate! Play!
• Empower your teams to play often, solve
problems through interactive games and
build Idea Banks where new solutions can
emerge at the intersections.
52

53. It will become how you see the world
• Instead of it being a ―thing‖ you do
sometimes.
• It will be the way you ―see‖ all the time.
• You will begin to look at the intersections of
ideas.
• You will turn to play to find solutions to small
and big problems, inside and outside the
box.
• You will listen differently, listening for dots.
53

54. Enjoy
54

55. We would like to express our appreciation for Innovation Games® and Agile Minds
for the use of their graphics, photos and game concepts. The approach was
developed by SAMC as part of our certification process.
This copy of our presentation today was created to help you take these tools and
apply them to your own company. The goal is to discover your company’s own
innovative Culture--with new ideas, new market space, new customers and new
demand. Please let us know how your exploring goes. We like to help others with
case studies. Perhaps you will become a success story we can share as well.
Send us your story to: asimon@simonassociates.net
We would love to continue our discussions. Feel free to Skype us andrea.j.simon
or connect however you like.
Simon Associates Management Consultants
1905 Hunter Brook Road
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
www.simonassociates.net
Info@simonassociates.net
55