Could Serious Play help you do Serious Work, Seriously? Innovation Games® can help you solve that problem that keeps you up at night.
Have you ever thought of bringing in people and watching them build your product for you or with you? For example, if you played “Build a Product Box” with them, you could observe as they built and re-built your product and then “sold” it to you. How would they do it, in ways you might never have imagined?
Or perhaps you have a lot of expense tied up in an engineer’s design of a new product. Could an Innovation Game help you reduce or eliminate features and functionality that really don’t add 
value? How about challenges among your own staff? New systems that are being implemented maybe aren’t working, or new quality improvement practices aren’t sticking. Could games aid engagement and help train those recalcitrant employees to embrace the changes and use the new?
Innovation Games: The bridge to new, previously undiscovered ideas and innovations
Market research has changed in so many ways in the new world of interactive media and gaming. As a result, engagement has proven to be the most effective way to transform the way business leaders listen to consumers, staff and each other.
As corporate anthropologists, we at SAMC encourage clients to do observational research and use 
anthropological tools. In 2012, we went to Brussels to become facilitators and trainers of Innovation Games after we watched how incredibly well they worked to enhance the observational research we were doing with clients. We have thus become believers in the value of the games for virtually any company, in any industry.
Why do Innovation Games work?
Innovation Games help people free their brains from the barriers of associations and let the ideas come through in ways you could not formerly imagine. There are dozens of Innovation Games to choose from; here are some of the ways they could be valuable for you:
Use an Innovation Game when you want to:
- Uncover unspoken needs
- Find breakthrough opportunities, unmet customer needs
- Identify a Blue Ocean Strategy® for growth
- Understand where your services fit your customers’ needs and lifestyles
- Deliver the right new features
- Make better strategic decisions
- Increase empathy for the customer’s experience within your organization
- Really listen to clients’ frustrations
- Enable your team to hang out and watch customers solve problems
- Find new market space that people cannot tell you about, have not thought about
- Engage your customers in co-creating your products or services
- “See, feel and think” about what customers are doing, how and how it feels to them, not you
- Substantially improve the way your company is doing things
- Increase efficiencies, find better ways to produce or service your products
What are Innovation Games?
The idea for Innovation Games was developed by Luke Hohmann. These “serious games to achieve serious results” were originally designed for primary market research in which customers are totally engaged in the creative process. Data is collected directly from customers, prospects or others, not from within.
Grounded in the cognitive and neurosciences, Innovation Games engage people in a way that frees their brains from their mind-maps, world views and associations. The brain has been well-tooled to think in a particular way, but those constraints can be opened up with games.
Collaborative Play Is The Key
The success of Innovation Games is in the collaborative play they bring about among participants, while a set of observers capture all the ideas, insights and body language—those unspoken cues that really tell you how people feel.
We would love to tell you more about how Innovation Games could help your company “see, feel and think” in new ways and convert those new ideas into effective, profitable innovations. Please contact us.
Games really can help you use serious play to do serious work, seriously!!
