Don't Miss Out: New Speakers, Certification, Last-Minute Discounts & more! 

The Innovation Games® Summit is only a week away, and it's not too late to join us. 

Don't miss Alexander Osterwalder's keynote.

We've pulled together two dozen sessions from leading companies like Cisco, Rackspace, Kaiser Permanente, Brocade (and more!) on how they are using serious games to do serious work-- sessions span such topics as Market Insight, Strategy, Sales Enablement, Collaboration and more.

And that's not all. We're also offering our Certified Innovation Games Facilitator workshop (part of the brand new Certified Innovation Games® Facilitator program) as as a pre-Summit workshop, not to mention the panels, keynotes and fun!

Still on the fence? We're offering 30% off to persuade you to attend. (New registrants only, folks.) Check out the website for complete details, and sign up today. 

AnswerLab's Liang Zhang recently profiled in Quirk's magazine how PayPal has been putting Innovation Games to work to better understand the shopping experience. PayPal, like many other Silicon Valley companies, has discovered that Fun leads to better Research Data.

Not Just for Mary Poppins

"Fostering a game-play mind-set by incorporating Innovation Games into your research efforts with customers, and even internally with your employees, can bring research to life and produce extraordinary results." Zhang writes. "Furthermore, Innovation Games can be applied broadly across all product development and even business planning activities." (True!)

What PayPal Wanted

"To drive new product innovation in mobile and online payments, the PayPal team sought to get a deep understanding of the end-to-end in-store shopping experience, both domestically and in Europe. They needed insight into consumers' challenges with in-store payments and potential digital solutions."

Don't Be afraid to Change

"As part of our Innovation Games research, we frequently integrate several different game design elements to create new innovation game methods and experiences based on our clients' objectives. We will explore a few of these hybrid innovation game approaches in the case study below to demonstrate how a game-play mind-set can enable you, as the researcher, to come up with creative solutions to uncover deep insights." 

Playing the Games

"During the first phase of the study," Zhang write, "we transformed a traditional usability research lab into a mock retail store environment to conduct mobile shop-alongs." The players were asked to complete a series of real shopping scenarios inside the mock retail store to test a new mobile payment application--a version of the Innovation Game Me and My Shadow.

In Phase 2, participants were asked to create a storyboard of their ideal human shopping assistant. "Teams of two to three people were instructed to come up with an ideal human shopping assistant, creating a storyboard to illustrate the specific tasks that this assistant would help them with during each phase of the shopping experience." (See the Gamestorming technique Empathy Map or the Innovation Game My Worst Nightmare for a variation.) 

PayPal's Results

"PayPal's mobile team discovers new factors and considerations for improving the end-to-end shopping experience -- beyond just the payment process. Several storyboards showed the shopping assistant helping people stick to their diet, get the best deals by remembering coupons and loyalty cards, bagging groceries while they paid and even alerting them to expiration dates at home. One person in the U.K. came to the realization that what she really needed was a modern-day Mary Poppins." (And really, who couldn't use a Mary Poppins?) 

Read the entire article here. 

3rd Annual Budget Games for San José, CA

OK, so we're not just gearing up for the first Innovation Games Summit. We're also preparing for the 3rd annual Budget Games for the City of San Jose, CA. We've

A short video about last year's Budget Games

worked with the City of San Jose and the Every Voice Engaged Foundation to bring San Jose citizens, community leaders and government officials together to use a specially adapted version of Buy a Feature to give the Mayor's office actionable feedback on the City's annual budget. This year many of the Innovation Games Summit Attendees are also volunteering their time on January 26 to help.  

Meaningful Games--Michigan to France