Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

Preparing for the Game

It helps to draw a timeline to make certain you're really remembering a future event as if it were the past. In Figure 2.7, the current date is February 2. In step 1, we project forward into the future to March 30 and ask our customer to remember their use of our product as of March 15 (a date that is in the future).

Vary the timeline to get different results. If you want to understand more about your near-term product plans, choose weeks, months, or quarters. If you want to understand more about how customers envision very general topics or issues regarding strategic evolution, consider projecting a decade or more into the future.

Practice how you phrase the question and how you present the game to your customers. This is especially important, as outlined in the sidebar "Framing the Question."

You can structure this game to deal with more than one question. This approach is suitable for strategic planning purposes, when you have multiple facets of the future that you want to explore. This also allows this game to scale to rather large group sizes.

Consider letting customers know about the broad topics you'd like to explore before the game to allow them to mentally prepare for the game.

Materials

• One easel with flip chart paper for each group of customers playing the game, plus an additional easel for the facilitator