Sessions by Track

Agile: Breakthrough Products & Services

Organizational Change with Innovation Games

Cory Foy (8th Light)

This talk will focus on implementing organizational change with Innovation Games. Cory will share insights from working with clients across the globe using a series of games to take a broad picture of an organization and distill it down into key directions for change. Along the way he'll cover effective use of Speed Boat, Spider Web, My Worst Nightmare, Buy a Feature and Product Box among others.

Using Agile Practices in the Enterprise to Feed & Shelter the World

Chad Holdorf (John Deere)

The world’s population is projected to climb from approximately 7 billion today to more than 9 billion by 2050. To put it bluntly, our world has a PROBLEM. We must double the food supply – double what we produce today in the next 40 years, and do so in a sustainable manner if we are to feed tomorrow's global citizens. How are we possible going to solve this? What technologies and processes are we going to use? In this talk, Chad Holdorf from John Deere, will share his “golden nuggets” on how the world’s largest manufacturer of agriculture equipment adopted and uses Agile practices at an enterprise level to feed and shelter the world.

Lean Startup in the Enterprise

David Luzquiños (BigVisible)

The principles put forth in Eric Ries’ Lean Startup aren’t just for startups. Lean startup practices can and do work in the enterprise too. In this breakfast session, Lean Startup in the Enterprise, agile and lean coach David Luzquiños discusses what lean startup in the enterprise is, how it works, and how agile principles and practices can help you quickly test and validate your hypotheses and gather customer feedback.

The Silence of Agile

Steve Rogalsky (Protegra)

In this practical session, learn how silence can increase collaboration and engagement while helping your project be more productive and innovative. Silent brainstorming allows everyone to have a voice, the loud people can't dominate the conversation and the quiet people are provided with a way to contribute. It turns out that using silence is also a very effective brainstorming technique in terms of the variety and number of ideas generated. In the first half of the session, we'll discuss the science of brainstorming and then practice a simple form of silent brainstorming. In the latter half of the session, participants will learn how to integrate silent brainstorming into Innovation Games and agile practices that you can use throughout the lifecycle of your projects and products.

Innovation Games + Agile in Retail Banking

Xavier Warzee (PaloIT)

We used Innovation Games to help one of the largest retail banking company to define guidances to adopt agile practices in various contexts, business areas, projects types and countries. More than seven countries were involved and we collected a large amount of information in a short period. Innovation Games not only helped us to collect rich information but also helped us to involve members of several teams among several countries. The result of our action opened new possibilities to engage people to define their new way of work!

Government: Games for Good

Smarter Local Government: Gaming the Way Forward 

Mark Dixon (IBM)

My Smarter Local Government and Cognitive Digital Democracy concepts advocate for regional community clouds and digital simulation gaming for 21st century government in the United States and the world. In this talk, Mark Dixon discusses the evolution and current challenges of local government in the US from an historical perspective and a digital prospective in the context of IT enterprise architecture. Dixon takes an historical view from various science fiction books and movies and project forward. His assertions is that gaming and simulation play a huge role in citizen engagement (hence Cognitive Digital Democracy) as part of making our government smarter ... starting at the local level.

Every Voice Engaged Network: Improving Your Community though Innovation Games

Steve Dodds (Every Voice Engaged Foundation)

As an Innovation Games Facilitator, you know the power of the games to help people collaborate in creating and prioritizing breakthrough ideas. The Every Voice Engaged Foundation is applying these tools and processes specifically to government organizations and other nonprofits. Attend this session to learn about the Every Voice Engaged Network and how you can join us. Our Ambassadors, Producers, Facilitators and Volunteers are committed to helping the communities they care about use Innovation Games-based solutions to better engage the people they serve!

Democracy Unleashed: Bringing Agility to Citizen Engagement

Gerry Kirk

Empowered individuals. Creative, participatory decision making. Connectedness and care for each other. These words apply equally to an Agile organization as to a healthy community. What might happen if we applied Agile values and methods to transform communities? I will share my experiences using in person and online Innovation Games to nurture engaged community in my home town - tools and methods, trials and triumphs. This includes work with city council, with citizens during local elections and a youth advocacy group.

Market Insight: Understand Your Customer

NCSA: Practical & Easy Application of Innovation Games

Andrea Emmons (NCSA Atheletic Recruiting Network)

Andrea Emmons will discuss how the NCSA Athletic Recruiting Network uses Innovation Games, and share how participants can use them in their customer-facing work, focusing on how simple guidelines can ensure the games go off without a hitch.  Participants will learn a few lessons, along with what they should avoid to make sure they are truly uncovering the needs of the customer.  Innovation Games covered will be Speed Boat, Product Box, 20/20 Vision and Buy a Feature.      

Understanding User Expectations & Experiences in Brand/Product Development

Ulf Hannelius (Aneega AB)

Scientific research shows how imagining a future experience is often more satisfactory than the actual experience, and how the memory of an experience is mostly determined by only a few key events. This feeds into the field of service and relationship marketing where the perceived quality of a service or a brand image should match or preferably exceed the hidden, outspoken and implied expectations of the customer. In this lecture, Ulf Hannelius summarizes this research and shows how it can be synthesized into a holistic brand and product design framework. He further suggests how to use this framework together with the Innovation Games® platform to analyze customer expectations and perceptions in order to develop brands and products that resonate with customers.

From General Hospital to Law & Order: How Reed Elsevier Uses Innovation Games to Dissect Customer Needs & Deliberate True  Requirements
Bonnie Vaughan (Reed Elsevier)
Chad Carpenter 

This presentation will focus on how various business units within Reed Elsevier use Innovation Games® such as Product Box, Give Them a Hot Tub, Buy a Feature and Speed Boat to engage customers in idea generation and elaboration sessions.  We use the techniques with diverse groups of customers, including lawyers, medical professionals, professors, students, military personnel, scientists and business executives in small and large-scale settings.  The results are always enlightening and sometimes surprising and can lead us into new directions with our products, marketing and business models.  We will share examples of these findings and the approaches used to gather them. We will also explore a few new twists on the games and discuss additional options for making them effective that we have implemented at Reed Elsevier.  Finally, we will discuss how to establish a nurturing environment for innovation and collaboration, while running the games, along with some warm-up exercises we use to get the sessions started.

Sales: Games for Fun & Profit

Improve Value Messaging & Customer Qualification with Product Box

Don Gray (Sales Engineering Group)

Based on Don Gray’s experience with his client, Qualcomm Wireless Business Solutions Europe (QWBSE), this session teaches participants how to use the Innovation Game® Product Box to develop better value messages and improve the qualification questions that sales representatives use to discover customer needs.

Games for Structured Outcomes in Complex Solution Sales

Paul Mantey (NetApp)

Innovation Games® provide an ideal platform for delivering structured outcomes from complex strategic solution sales.  Game play opens up customer conversations by creating a safe, open environment shifting the focus from the seller's products and solutions to the buyer's needs and challenges.   These techniques have proven effective in both straightforward client/vendor meetings as well as more complex, multi-partner workshops.  Effectively applying game techniques in customer situations creates a win-win scenario for customers and partners alike – illuminating challenges and potential solution roadmaps while providing significant insight and valuable strategic information to partners.

The Social IT Games: Myers-Briggs for Organizations

Kevin Parker (Serena Software)

Serena Software's Social IT Game, powered by Knowsy, and is an iPad-based 90-minute workshop that uses gamification to reveal cross-functional priorities within enterprise IT organizations. These revelations allow IT leadership teams to move forward with a new clarity about how common challenges are prioritized across the organization. In one recent game with a large retail chain, the entire IT management team had uniform consensus that Delivering Measurable Value to the Business was everyone’s number one priority. But there was clear division between the DEV and the OPS communities over the relative importance of More Rigorous Controls versus More Timely Execution in the release management process. And from this an informative debate ensued. Find out what Serena has learned about their target market, and how the company is using the Social IT Game powered by Knowsy to create dialogue, solutions and revenue.

Strategy: Unleash Internal Teams

Ditch the Conference Call: How Brocade Used Innovation Games for Engaging, Distributed Meetings
Deb Colden  (Deb Colden Executive Coaching / Innovation Games)

We’ve all been through it. The company wants innovative thinking and breakthrough ideas for its business and customers and thinks your team can deliver. As the meeting leader, you are excited!  But then reality shows up. Your team is distributed and there is no budget for travel.  It’s time to ditch the massive slide deck and droning conference call.  In this session, you will learn how Steve Fischer from Brocade's HR team engaged 31 participants from the corporate office and distributed locations to overcome the often deadly consequences of mixed in person/remote meetings: Creating instead an event in which everyone remote or in-person fully participated and engaged with one another in a highly creative and productive innovation session.

Kaiser Permanente's Leading Innovation Game

Deanna Konrath (Kaiser Permanente)

Why is it so hard to innovate? How might we make the journey easier for innovators? And so began our journey to create an immersive experience for 75 leaders and innovators to explore this dilemma, while attending Kaiser Permanente’s annual Innovation Retreat in 2011. After following the innovation lifecycle to ideate, prototype and field test our concept in less than six months, we landed on the unexpected. By developing a game, we changed how teams could learn and discuss what it really takes to innovate. Leading Innovation is an immersive experience designed to help leaders and innovators better understand and plan for challenges they might face.  We continue to spread and gather stories of how the game is being utilized in a variety of ways. Join us for this interactive session to learn how we are using this game in different ways and get some real game play in to experience it for yourself.

Acquiring Funding for Your Innovation Game Project

David Putnam (Fantex)

Explore and discuss strategies for acquiring funding for your Innovation Games program.  This talk will discuss both a large organizational approach, as well as funding in a start-up.  Who are the constituents/stakeholders, how to position your program to secure funding, and let's talk about your situation.

Remember the Future for Strategic Planning

Michele Sliger (Sliger Consulting)

This session will offer a slightly different take on how to use the Innovation Game® Remember the Future, a game normally used to answer the question “What should our product do?”. Instead, we’ll use Remember the Future to consider “What should our company do?” Specific visualization guidance is used to narrow the focus in the creation of an organization’s mission, goals and values. First, we’ll review the process, and then we’ll play the game as a group, applying our thoughts to the gaming community.

Playing to Build Great Projects from Unknown Needs
Jorge Zavala (Kinnevo)

Innovation is a challenge for everybody; focusing on finding new business is very hard. Creating innovation environments to learn needs from customers, employees and colleagues can be more successful if you first remove barriers. A great way to remove them is by using serious games techniques. We have used Innovation Games® in groups ranging from 4 people to 600 to learn participant needs and convert these needs through playing games into base ideas to be converted in new projects.


Grab Bag


Best Practices in Collaboration: The Cisco Collaboration Work Practice Study

Harbrinder Kang (Cisco)

What does collaboration look like at Cisco? What motivates us to collaborate? What drives successful collaboration and what inhibits it? How do employees collaborate day to day? Cisco wanted to find out – and thus the Cisco Collaboration Work Practice Study was launched. The purpose of the study was to gain insights into the human behavior of collaboration to enable us to work more efficiently and drive business results at Cisco. This global study reveals how employees think about collaboration, what makes collaboration successful and what challenges we face. It provides an in-depth view of how employees work and collaborate in a variety of work settings and roles. At this session, Harbrinder Kang, Sr. Director of Collaboration Business Platforms at Cisco, will share with you the insights Cisco gained from the study, the actions they took to transform collaboration practices, and the business value Cisco is deriving as a result.

Innovation Games Online (IGO) 2.0

Dan O'Leary, Innovation Games

The Innovation Games® Development Team is about to embark on a substantial set of improvements for IGO, including better support for iPads  and improved workflows for planning games, managing players, and post-processing results. Before we make these changes, we want to share our ideas and get your feedback on how we can improve. We're planning a fun and engaging interactive session in which we'll review workflows, storyboards, lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes, bring your creativity and your wish lists on how we can make IGO 2.0 the best platform for online collaborative play.

Happier Employees and Clients: More Fun at Work with Innovation Games

Cesario Ramos (AgiliX)

If you are looking for ways to change the way you work and improve your products and customer service along the way this session is for you. Cesario Ramos will discuss how his team has used Innovation Games with more than 100 people to align sales teams for cross selling, increase collaboration and resolve management team conflicts, while better engaging employees to improve the services they offer clients. He will describe the process, the games, how they were tailored and what was learned.

Path to Greatness: The Certified Innovation Games® Facilitator Program

Patrick Shaw (Innovation Games®)

The goal of this session is to introduce participants to the Certified Innovation Games® Facilitator Program, which was created to help companies identify the facilitators they need and to help facilitators promote their skills and experience. We'll review and explain the design of the program, how the program works, the benefits of becoming certified, and how a Certified Facilitator can increase their ranking. We'll also explain how this program rewards online and in-person facilitation for Innovation Games®, Gamestorming games, and other approved techniques within our community. We'll also outline how Facilitators can earn and be recognized for special achievements or skills, such as being an excellent discussion leader, or possessing unique knowledge of a given domain.

Innovation Games: Roll Out by Infection at Rackspace
Tony Wolf (Rackspace)

We often talk about rolling out programs. Whether the programs are Agile Transformations, Business Process Re-engineering, the various activities of “Change Agents” or even Innovation Games®. However, we do not often discuss exactly what this means. What works? What doesn’t? How does one go about encouraging or implementing a culture of innovation through gaming in a large organization? This talk presents a case study of a company doing just that. We will talk about how Innovation Games were introduced and permeated through Rackspace: from the first introduction through the current effort to build a “Racktivity Room”, a dedicated conference room for Serious Gameplay. We will review the initiatives that were taken, what worked, what didn’t, where we are today, and where we are going tomorrow. 

Track Descriptions

Sales: Games for fun and profit
Innovation Games and related techniques help sales teams succeed through out the entire sales cycle:  This track explores how games enable sales teams to quickly understand customer problems, improve collaboration, deliver the right solutions and strengthen customer relationships, while driving increased revenue.   Sessions cover process, management and tools.

Strategy: Unleash Internal Teams
Innovation Games enable organizations to leverage their entire company to improve strategic planning. In this track, sessions will explore how organizations and teams use games and related techniques to create compelling strategic visions, prioritize portfolios and create more thorough and actionable roadmaps, along with other topics.

Market Insight: Understand your Customer
This track explores how Innovation Games help organizations improve the effectiveness of their marketing and market research. Topics include surfacing and focusing on the right market opportunity, creative customer engagement techniques, better customer collaboration, crafting solutions to real market problems and more.

Agile: Breakthrough Products and Processes
Many of the practices and processes followed by product and agile teams are enhanced and improved through the integration of Innovation Games®. This track explores how Innovation Games and related techniques help teams engages with customers and stakeholders to identify new product/feature opportunities, create better product roadmaps and understand how to increase product profitability.

Government: Games for Good
In today’s political and economic environment, it’s harder than ever to find common ground. This track explores how Innovation Games have been used by nonprofits and local governments to bring elected officials, community leaders and constituents together to work collaboratively to tackle budgeting and other community issues.

Grab Bag
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