TEI 037: Using Games to Help Your Group Create Amazing Products

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 037 of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

Our Guest: Luke Hohmann was recommended by the VP of Global Innovation of the RELX Group, Jeff Honious, who was my guest in episode 28. Consequently, I knew I had to interview Luke to learn about his tools for innovators. Luke is the founder and CEO of The Innovation Games, which is now known as Conteneo. His past experiences include computer scientist, engineer, and product manager. Luke is serious about the smart application of games to optimize decision making in innovation, product development, and market research, and numerous companies use his tools. He is also the author of “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play.” My favorite line from his profile is: “Luke’s an old school Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Instead of building a company to flip, he’s building a company to change the world.”

Buy A Feature is an example of an innovation game. It helps the group decide which projects are most important and makes the best use of their available resources. To use it, say you have:

• 20 possible projects and the total budget for all them is $20M
• But you only have $8M available for new projects
• Instead of creating a competitive environment for selecting the projects, you create a collaborative environment.
• This could be accomplished by telling eight decision-makers that they each have $1M to allocate to projects.
• They must work together to determine the projects of highest value.