Most of the time, what you think your product should do is an extrapolation of what it has done in the past. Your pet grooming service should be faster or trendier. Your fast-food restaurant should deliver orders more accurately. The car you're designing should be safer or faster. When we brainstorm about product improvement, it's easy to resort to trivial fixes and incremental improvements. After all, continuous performance improvement is the lifeblood of operations and crucial to remaining competitive in a constantly evolving industry.

On the other hand, when we use the word "brainstorm," we're seeking a different kind of improvement all together. How many times have you heard a beleaguered brainstorming facilitator urge attendees to "think outside the box?" The goal of a brainstorming meeting is to invite breakthrough change-the kind of change that only happens when you're willing to rethink the fundamentals of your business.  

Unfortunately, breakthrough change rarely occurs using the brainstorming techniques we're familiar with. Sitting around a whiteboard with an operations team scratching down ideas to build a better mouse trap isn't thinking outside the box-it only succeeds in making the box a little bigger.

21apps continues to spread the good word about Innovation Games in the United Kingdom, most recently at SharePoint Saturday UK. Andrew & Ant's Innovation Games Workshop was packed, and you can see all the great product boxes created by the attendees on the 21apps YouTube Channel. As 21apps asserts, technology won't help you meet your organizations goals alone. You need tools like Innovation Games to get you there.

France

Aubrey Conseil writes about the recent popularity of Agile games in France on his blog Scrum, Agilite ... et Rock 'n Roll, mentioning Innovation Games Trained Facilitator Alexandre Boutin's recent one day Innovation Games seminar as just one example of the phenomena. He includes a photo of some of the Product Boxes produced and a summary of feedback, including this gem: "plus de place pour les jeux dans l'entreprise!" or en Anglais, "There's more room for games in business!" Check out the complete post (and my translation skills) here.      

The author of the Cascrum.com blog (It's Scrum! En Francais) also attended Alexandre Boutin's workshop at Agile Toulouse, relating how games put one in a state of relaxation, sharing, listening and solidarity  

Innovation Games get a shout out as a method for generating creative ideas in Paul Herwath's post about a session, "Innovation Needs Waste," by Dirk Lässig and Pierluigi Pugliese at XPDays 2011. Herwath writes, that while many lean or agile methods have the elimination of wasted effort at their core, if the goal is to develop an innovative solution or an innovative product, the focus in the first step cannot be avoidance of waste. To read more, click here.

We've long been a fan of the work done by David Sibbet and The Grove. (The Instant Play Game Cover Story is a game originated by The Grove Consultants.) So, it was a real treat to stumble across this review of David's book Visual Meetings by a Thoughtworks business analyst named KK that mentions Innovation Games as a complementary tool.  "Display making, mapping, diagramming & graphic recording all shift what we can see and can't see in different ways," writes Sibbet in Visual Meetings. KK adds that Innovation Games are great examples of how the visual helps make these connections. "Product Box, Prune the Future (a.k.a. Prune the Product Tree), Empathy Map -- almost every time we're surprised by the new discoveries [made] through such exercises no matter how confident we were before them [of the outcome]. Click here to read more.    

• Qualified Instructor Scotty Bevill and Trained Facilitators Maria Matarelli and Brian Levy brought Innovation Games to the fall workshops at PMI Manitoba and to Agile Winipeg.  
• Luke is named one of the to 50 management experts to follow on Twitter by Evan Carmichael.