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 $20MBut you only have $8M
available for new projectsInstead 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.