On Jan 29th, 2011, history was made when a diverse and highly motivated group of community leaders and engaged citizens from the City of San Jose played a specially designed Innovation Game® to provide feedback regarding their budget priorities to the Mayor's office. In what has the potential to become a template for igniting a whole new kind of civic engagement through serious games, this second post of a three part series shares event results and experiences from many of the participants, including community leaders, city officials, and Innovation Games® Facilitators. Be on the lookout for my third and final post, where I will provide ideas on how Innovation Games® can be used to help solve a variety of civic problems.

Background: Motivation and Goals  

Like many city, state and national governments, the City of San Jose, CA, is facing a significant 2011-2012 budget deficit. To quickly recap the motivations and goals described in my first post of this three-part series:  

• The Mayor's office wanted to better understand the priorities of citizens regarding key budget initiatives to help inform the budgeting process.
• The event organizers wanted to try Innovation Games® as a way to engage community leaders in giving feedback.
• Community leaders, representing a diverse cross-section of the city, wanted to participate in the budget process.

At the outset, I'll point out that Mayor Reed thought the event was a "huge success". Read the rest of this post to find out why.

Curious about what Chinese Takeout boxes and pipe cleaners have to do with getting work done? Come to IG Exchange and find out.

What: Unconference for folks interested in collaborative play and serious games

When: March 19, 2011; 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Where: Hacker Dojo, Mountain View, CA

Why: Innovation Games are Serious Fun.

Register: igexchange.innovationgames.com  

Shout out: Thanks to Pragmatic Marketing and XPLANE for sponsoring! It's going to be a great day to play games.

In this blog post from SmokeJumperStrategy.com, Brent Harrison explains why our new white-label version of Knowsy, Knowsy Knows, is an attractive alternative to group buying sites like Groupon, Living Social, etc.

I often describe Groupon, Living Social and other daily deal sites as providing small businesses a large, fishing drift net to cast broadly into the ocean; the result is you will no doubt collect a lot of sea life, but only some of which will be the targeted species you are actually fishing for. Luke's metaphor is certainly more colorful and may, in fact, be truer than mine.

So what's the alternative? Well, we just launched the first ever "white-label, celebrity-branded, social contest app" for the iPad.  

Click here to read on. 

This month Wako Takayama, our Vice President of Marketing is my "Meet the Team" victim, taking time out of her busy schedule to answer my semi-silly questions and tell us a little bit about herself.  

She has a diverse background that includes qualitative market

Wako Takayama

research (she's an anthropologist by training, after all), developing handwriting recognition products, advertising shampoo and cereal, and marketing and delivering services in the sustainable, energy efficiency and complementary healthcare arenas. Phew! The common thread through it all has been listening for understanding; being a customer champion. Which brings her to Innovation Games where she works on consulting projects and leads the marketing efforts.

One of the essential activities when designing your Buy a Feature game is pricing the items within the game. The goal is to develop a pricing scheme that helps you gain insight into your customers true motivations. Here are some tips and techniques to help you. I'll cover:  

• Simple pricing, when every item is the same price
• Pricing based on shirt sizes
• Complex pricing schemes

The good news is that you can play around with a variety of different pricing schemes to help you determine the best approach.

Simple Pricing: When Everything is the Same Price
The simplest form of pricing items is to make every single item the same price. You should use this technique when the cost to create these items and/or the value that these items provide are roughly the same. Which means you're probably not going to use this approach very much, because most of the time items have a differentiated cost. And, since the players of the game know that items have different costs, the game is actually less fun if the items are priced the same when they cost different amounts to create. So, use this approach with caution.  

Click here to read more.