Market Innovation through Game Play

Attending a workshop with Luke Hohmann, founder and president of  The Innovation Games Company is like a perpetual sugar rush from consuming all your Halloween candy with no crash and burn.    The man runs on an atomic clock.  Always in sync with the moment, delivering an endless supply of energy.

The Innovation Games Company provides the tools no marketing professionals can live without.  My opinion yes, but stay with me on this.  We’re in the age of rapid web and mobile application development, right?   Bits are being pushed out at a faster pace than ever.   We use the “beta” label to justify our works in progress.    Some remain in beta purgatory like Google Chrome and then die.   Other code like Silverlight never should have left beta.   The point is software is moving from factory to field at an unprecedented rate, with delivery methods such as SaaS making time to market a non-factor in the launch.   True innovation at the programming level is happening.   But alone it doesn’t guarantee we’re building what our customers want or need.   The net result, market innovation is negatively impacted by applying traditional market research tools to newer agile development methodologies.

Not to name names, but there are many large and even mid-sized tech companies that have lost the innovators edge.   Some have filled that gap with supply chain efficiency.   This is not an either or argument.   You do need both, but more than ever you need to capture and process the customer conversation faster than the current market research tools allow.   Even today’s leading Social CRM solutions lack the capabilities to process customer requirements in real-time.    We’re talking about taking the customer’s voice and requirements input from months of data collection down to weeks, days, and even hours.

The Innovation Games Company provides serious game play by tapping the ultimate source of market knowledge, your customers.    The game participants (your customers) and the observers (you) enjoy hours of fun and some serious learning.   As Luke points out, this is not play ground stuff.   There is a lot of cognitive behavior going on.    Generating a pure release of conscious thinking in your customers through serious game play that ultimately drives innovative ideas to improve your products.

Playing a two-hour innovation game with your target customers uncovers the type of meaningful requirements that may not otherwise surface. There are over a dozen games to choose from to help you in your product management, marketing, strategy and even supply chain operations. “Prune the Product Tree” or “Buy a Feature” for example  are designed to rationalize the product requirements your customers value most, in real-time.    Most of the games can be facilitated by a trained facilitator with your product domain knowledge. Many are now available online to provide scale and iterative capabilities.  Just go to The Innovation Games Company site to find a facilitator, or play a game online and learn how to unleash true  market innovation through your customers.