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In This Issue
Master Class for Consultants
Innovation Games at Work
From the Blog
Game for Gov
Game Spotlight
Cyberspace Roundup
Meet the Team
Quick Links
Play a Game!
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Innovation Games for Consultants

IG Book
Calling all Consultants. Join Luke Hohmann on August 25-26, 2011 in Mountain View, CA, for our two-day Innovation Games class, designed especially for consultants. You'll learn how to plan, play & post-process the games, in addition to advice on structuring & planning client engagements. 

 

Register here

Cost: $500*  

50% off Refresher Discount available for Trained Facilitators. 

 

*Courtesy pricing for Consultants only.  

#Innovgames at ISAGA 2011

On July 12th, Innovation Games Trained Facilitator Julia Feng will present a half-day session called "Applying Games to Solve Real World Problems" at the 2011 International Simulation and Gaming Association Conference in Warsaw, Poland.  

 

ISAGA 2011

Warsaw, Poland  

July 11-15, 2011  

   
New Innovation Game Debuts at Triple Helix IX

On July 14th, the Innovation Games team will guide more than 300 players through a specially designed game, Trilicious, at the Triple Helix IX conference at Stanford in Palo Alto, CA. Designed by CEO Luke Hohmann, the game will help participants learn more about Triple Helix interactions and will surface the latest thinking about ways in which the Triple Helix model has been applied.  

 

Triple Helix IX 

July 11-14, 2011  

Innovgames Training in Texas  

Qualified Instructor Jeff Brantley will be holding several Innovation Games classes in various locations in Texas this summer. Click on each session for complete details.  

 

Houston, July 26

Dallas, Aug. 16

August 2011: Agile Teams Class  

Qualified Instructor Jeff Brantley will be teaching an Innovation Games for Agile Teams class in Austin, TX on August 23. The class covers in-person and online games, facilitation and presentation skills. Register early for discounts.  

Innovgames Comes to the Mile High City 

Qualified Instructor Jeff Brantley will be teaching a 2-day Innovation Games class in Denver, CO on July 12-13. The class covers in-person and online games, facilitation and presentation skills. Register early for discounts.  

Bevill Edge® adds Innovation Games Class in Chicago

Qualified Instructor Scotty Bevill will be teaching a 2-day Innovation Games for Customer Understanding course in Chicago on July 19-20, 2011. The class covers in-person and online games, facilitation and presentation skills. Register early for discounts.  

InnovGames Training Comes to St. Louis, MO.

Qualified Instructor Scotty Bevill will be teaching a 2-day Innovation Games for Customer Understanding course in St. Louis, MO, on July 26-27, 2011. The class covers in-person and online games, facilitation and presentation skills. Register early for discounts.  

Milwaukee, WI: 2-Day  Innovation Games Training

Qualified Instructor Scotty Bevill will be teaching a 2-day Innovation Games for Customer Understanding course in Milwaukee, WI, on August 2-3, 2011. The class covers in-person and online games, facilitation and presentation skills. Register early  for discounts.  

 September 2011: Innovation Games Class in Stockholm

Join Maarten Volders, an Innovation Games Qualified Instructor, for a 2-day Innovation Games class in Stockholhm, Sweden

on September 8-9, 2011. Early Bird rate ends August 8;

register now.


 September 2011: Innovation Games Class in Helsinki, Finland

Join Maarten Volders, an Innovation Games Qualified Instructor, for a 2-day Innovation Games class in Helsinki, Finland

on September 13-14, 2011. Early Bird rate ends August 12;

register now.


Innovation Games for Consultants 

Join CEO and Founder Luke Hohmann for a

2-day Innovation Games class 

designed for consultants in Mountain View, CA

on October 10-11, 2011. You'll learn how to plan, play & post-process the games, in addition to advice on structuring & planning client engagements.


Register here.

Cost: $500*


50% off Refresher Discount available for Trained Facilitators. 

 

*Courtesy pricing for Consultants only.

November 2011: Innovation Games Class in Belgium

Join Maarten Volders, an Innovation Games Qualified Instructor, for a 2-day Innovation Games class in Mechelen, Belgium

on November 28-29, 2011. Early Bird rate ends Oct. 28;

register now.


Greetings!


Welcome to latest issue of Your Next Move!, our monthly newsletter covering the latest news, events and announcements from the Innovation Games®

community.

Innovation Games at Work

The Military Health System's Health Games  

One of the most powerful features of Innovation Games Online is the ability to take any image and transform it into a visual collaboration game. We've had a lot of fun transforming classic strategy and business diagrams (such as Theodore Levitt's Whole Product concept) into online games, but one of the most unique "Design Your Own" games we've seen has to be the online game designed by the Military Health System. The game's purpose is to explore how collaboration can be used to better server patients and their families; in other words, explore how health is a team sport. One of the insights is that health is a "Defense" game, and we want to play "Offense" to drive to health as well. Two team members from the Federal Health Futures Group Networked Community, who responsible for the game design and research, Project Manager Sheila Sokol and Architect Mei Lin Fung, recently took the time to fill us in on the game.

Health as team sport

Using the metaphor of American Football, players begin the game on the 50 yard line.

 

Why did you use a game to explore how health is a team sport?      

Sheila: The individuals playing the game are a generation that already plays online games; it's part of their lives and culture. We wanted to apply this experience and allow them to use the skills they've acquired in gaming to solving real-world problems.

Mei Lin: The need for collaboration and teamwork is something we know is needed in the curriculum and continuing education for healthcare professionals. Duke University has been working with the Health and Human Services Agency in evolving the operations of Community Health Centers. Over 20 years, they have found that dramatically better outcomes and lower costs are achieved when the community and health professionals work together as a team. The Health as a Team Sport game was a tool to explore these issues encompassing prevention, reduction of hospital re-admissions, chronic care and critical care.

 

Can you tell us about the design of the game?
Mei Lin: The game was invented/designed by Dr. Michael Dinneen, Director of the Office of Strategy Management for the Military Health System and Dr. Ahmed Calvo, Chief of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in the U.S. Federal Agency Health and Human Services. In the design, we used the metaphor of gridiron football (American football). Game play wasn't based on the rules of a typical football game. Instead, the game as designed by we used the metaphor of football to allow our players to discuss how negative influences and actions can be can be counteracted by positive/healthy factors.

Click here to read the complete interview.

From the Blog

Using Buy a Feature for Doing Good

Luke Hohmann
Luke photo 

Water.org, the Boy Scouts of America and Compassion International are three of the many thousands of truly wonderful nonprofits and NGOs from around the world that are tackling some of the world's toughest problems. And while The Innovation Games® Company hasn't had the good fortune to work with these organizations, some my conversations over the last few weeks with friends associated with these organizations, and a recent Fast Company article about Matt Damon and Water.org, encouraged me to keep the conversation flowing about how Innovation Games® can be designed to solve some very hard problems. My hope is these ideas inspire these and other nonprofits to leverage both in-person and online games.

Getting Dads Involved With Their Sons
A few Sundays ago I spent a bunch of time with Brad Waugh and other facilitators at the IP Business Congress, facilitating what is now an annual set of games on the role of the Chief Intellectual Property Officer (CIPO). Brad, who works as an IP Attorney at Cooley, was helping facilitate the CIPO games as a subject matter expert. On the way home from the event, our conversation turned to Brad's work with the Cub Scouts. Brad asked if the games might be able to help him get more parents involved in planning events with their sons. This was a golden opportunity to practice game design skills, and the other trained facilitators in the car, including Francine Gordon, Greg Cohen of the 280 Group, and David Carter, both a trained facilitator and patent agent, jumped at the chance.

 

Click here to read more.  


Games for Gov
More Innovation Games for Good

From ChangeCamp in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, to the Budget Games in San Jose, CA, to LocalGovCamp in the UK, Innovation Games are being used by ordinary citizens to influence and effect change with their governments. It's a phenomenon we're proud of and encouraging. After seeing Innovation Games help our corporate clients succeed, it's heartening to see the same techniques being used to solve the hard problems faced by our governments. Here's this month's roundup of blog posts on games for good.

Gamification and Law, Part 2
L.B. Jeffries, a lawyer from South Carolina, has written three-part series on how the principles of Buy a Feature gamification can be successfully applied to law. In part 2 he writes, in part, about how our January 2011 Budget Games for the City of San Jose, CA, is a good example of Jane McGonigal's belief that games can be used to strengthen and build communities. "A great example of this is a recent budgeting experiment in San Jose, CA," writes Jeffries. "A company called Innovation Games created a game called Buy a Feature. Community leaders from various backgrounds were paired into teams of eight and given a finite amount of virtual money. They could buy certain budget features but never all of them. Each group created their own budget which reflected a model for how the actual city should dispose of its funds." The game worked, Jeffries posits, because "The game designers going about fixing a legal system must be given specific goals for those designs to induce." Click here to read the complete post.

Innovation Games at LocalGovCamp
Antony Clay, Chief Strategy Officer of 21 Apps, brought Innovation Games to an unconference on local government in Birmingham, England earlier this month. Antony submitted several sessions, but it was the session on using Innovation Games in the public sector that really got people excited, including another attendee who blogs as CuriousCatherine.


Success Stories
Quova: Innovation Games for Sales Training
Quova Dodds Logo Cropped

Tami Carter, VP of Marketing, interviews Steven Dodds, Quova's VP of Global Sales and Services about Innovation Games' use for Sales Training.

Steven Dodds, VP of Global Sales and Services at Quova, recently shared how Quova incorporated Innovation Games into sales training to encourage the sharing of best practices. Click on the image above or this link to hear how Quova used Spider Web and Remember the Future to explore relationships between and inside account and improve sales performance.

Game Spotlight
Transforming Speed Boat

The metaphor is often one of the most powerful drivers behind a successful visual collaboration game, and we're always excited to see the innovative ways the Innovation Games community are adapting the games and game metaphors to meet their needs. Here's a collection of blog posts on how Speed Boat, in particular, has been transformed to help people do real work around the world.

The Climbing Game
Gojko Adzic, founder of Neuri ltd., a UK-based software
Climbing Game

Gojko Adzic transformed Speed Boat into the Climbing Game.

consultancy, recently wrote about how he adapted our Speed Boat game for a Specification by Example workshop in Australia. Gojko wanted to discover what his workshop participants knew about the benefits and challenges of Specification by Example at the workshop's outset, in essence using Speed Boat to measure knowledge levels. Instead of an image of a boat, Gojko used the metaphor of climbing a mountain. In his words, "a long, challenging and exhausting process with some interesting views along the way, similar to implementing a process change in a software firm." The game was a success, enabling Gojko to adjust the workshop schedule "to fit individual needs." Click here to read more about his game design.

Speed Boat for Retrospectives
CARA Lyon, an agile group in Lyon, France, recently used Speed Boat to run a retrospective on the group's activities since the group's founding. Franck Depierre writes in his blog that, "Romain Couturier [one of the 20+ trained Innovation Games Facilitators in France] led the retrospective and proposed the Speed Boat game to achieve it." Depierre continues, "the boat was our local organization, CARA Lyon. We started to display anchors, which slowed down the speed of our boat. Soon, we understood we didn't know where we were coming from and where we were going to." To see a slide show of the game in action and read more, click here.

L'amélioration avec un Speed Boat
Alexandre's Speed Boat

This Speed Boat Game played for a project retrospective shows the Agile Coach as driving the boat.


Another Innovation Games Trained Facilitator in France, Alexandre Boutin, writes about his experience with Speed Boat to evaluate a team's adaption of Agile principles and whether the project had been complete in full Agile mode. Alexandre posts a photo of the finished boat, which includes images of himself (the project coach) driving the boat and whales, in addition to traditional anchors. Check out his post here (in French) and the team's finished Speed Boat.

Speed Boat Makes Waves in Australia and Brazil
Atlassian's Nicolas Muldoon recently recommended using Speed Boat (and other Innovation Games) in his talk, "Be the Change You Seek -- Kickstart Innovation" at Agile Australia 2011. According to Zane Gambasian's blog post, Nicolas offered up Innovation Games as a way to answer the question "What do you do when you want innovation, but you need to prove you need some time to get work on them?" Click here to read Zane's complete post or check out Nicolas's slides here.

Both Speed Boat and Product Box are featured in this post on a Brazilian website, Ogerente Canais, as effective tools for agile project management. According the post, adopting Innovation Games to identify customer needs and gather requirements allows greater interaction between team members, more active participation of key stakeholders in the project and improved communication and motivation for the team.


Cyberspace Roundup
Agile Games, Seeking Perfection, IP Worst Nightmares & more ...

It's been a busy month in cyberspace for Innovation Games, from Innovation Games and Agile practices to Chief Intellectual Property Officers exploring their worst IP nightmares to Innovation Games, to the search for perfection. Read on for a few of this month's gems.

Making a Game of Agile
It's no secret that games are becoming an increasingly important tool for Agile teams. In this article on the phenomenon, SD Times' Victoria Reitano, profiles several companies using Innovation Games, including VersionOne, Seapine Software and others.

Is the Search for Perfection Killing your Team's
Snow Summit Prune the Product Tree

Panoptika's Meggan Wilson facilitates a Prune the Product Tree game

Innovation Potential?

Panoptika's Steve Wilson and Megann Wilson write about how Innovation Games excel at helping people not only come up with new ideas, but involving those folks that are necessary for getting those ideas done. Steve and Megann write, "Get some customers involved in a non-threatening environment (no swarming allowed!) and figure out which problems can be solved, and which of these will have the greatest impact. Commit to leaving the room with a solution, not just to identifying the problems."

A Baker's Dozen of Tools
Innovation Games -- and our new Instant Play games (which include agile games like Bang for the Buck Prioritization) -- are included as one of 13 tools David Koontz thinks agile teams should be using.

Innovation and the Digital Generation
Luke stirs things up (about 25 minutes in) during his participation on this panel at the Global Innovation Forum: Silicon Valley, put on by SRI and San Jose State's Graduate School of Business. Click through to read the article and watch the video.

Meet the Team
Our Man in Belgium: Maarten Volders

Maarten Volders, one of our Innovation Games® Qualified

Maarten Volders

Maarten Volders

Instructors, is this month's star. You can find a complete list of his upcoming Innovation Games courses here.  

 

What is your favorite Innovation Game?
Remember the Future. As a Jedi, you're in control of one's mind, guiding him/her through unexplored territory for shaping a futuristic vision.

What is your favorite place in the world?
Without doubt this must be Iceland. Air, earth, water and fire, all of nature elements in one place in its most beautiful and extreme forms. If you walk the streets, meet the people and get a sense of their culture, you'll see they are one with what surrounds them. Every time the plane hits the tarmac there, I feels like I'm home. One day it will be home ...

What has been your proudest moment?
As a father, there is no higher emotion then the one felt when seeing your 4 year-old help your 2 year-old to explore the world.

If you could meet any famous historical person, who would it be?

William Edwards Deming. As a Systems Thinker and Organizational Effectiveness Coach, I would really like to have picked his brain for a couple of hours. Although not many people followed his ideology during his time on earth, I would like to thank him and tell him he was right and his work is being continued.

What's your favorite piece of clothing?
A shirt. I'm a sleeves rolled up kind of guy. You can only learn by making your hands dirty.          

 

Have any news about the Innovation Games® community?  Email us at info@innovationgames.com.

 

Can't wait for the next newsletter? Do you have to know what's new with Innovation Games®, right now? Find out what's happening with us at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and our blog.    

 

Sincerely,
Tami's signature

Tami Carter
The Innovation Games® Company
Two Months Free!   
Sign up for an Innovation Games Online subscription (professional or nonprofit) and get the first two months free with the promo code YNM611. Both subscriptions include access to all the games, including Design Your Own visual collaboration game and Buy a Feature, public and private games, advanced analytics and more. This coupon is transferable. Please share it with interested parties.
Offer Expires:
Aug. 1, 2011