Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

Playing the Game

Give customers the option of working alone or in teams. Although the game typically produces the most interesting results when customers work as a group, the nature of exploring relationships can be personal, and some customers will be more comfortable working alone.

Encourage your customers to draw lines with different colors, weights, and styles. Annotate the lines with as much information as possible; more information fuels innovation and helps you in post-processing the results.

Encourage your customers to include any affected company, system, role, or person. When you review these diagrams with your customer, ask them for names, titles, motivations, and so forth.

You may find that your spider web resembles a process-flow or supply-chain diagram. That's okay.

Try putting the Spider Web game together with the Start Your Day game by asking customers if they can think of or can draw different webs at different times of the day, the week, the month, or the quarter.

Try varying the location of where the product is used when asking customers to draw their web. Do you think business executives would draw the same spider web for a laptop computer when they're using it on a plane as compared to when they're using it in their office or at their home?

When your customers are finished creating their spider webs, ask them to describe the webs to the group. Encourage customers to directly ask questions and see which customers resonate with various relationships.