It has been a week since Agile 2010 and this post feels long overdue. Yet, I’m finding that spending a week catching up on work, including a special project with Lowell Lindstrom to conduct an Agile 2010 conference retrospective using Innovation Games®, has given me a rare chance for a sharper perspective on the conference. And it is now abundantly clear: Innovation Games® (and other forms of serious games – more on this in a bit) have moved from Innovators / Technology Enthusiasts and is squarely into the Early Adopters. And this is an exciting place to be.

First, let’s step back to make sure everyone knows what I’m talking about. While the technology adoption life cycle has been studied for decades, it was really popularized by Geoffrey Moore’s excellent book Crossing the Chasm. Simplifying quite a bit, and picking one of the many hundreds of images that are available on the internet, the technology adoption curve, and the chasm that Geoffrey talks about, looks like this.

Of course, Moore’s book was focused on the big charm that exists between the Early Adopters and the Early Majority. And, I think that time has proven that Geoffrey’s insights were spot-on, and the advice in his book have helped countless numbers of entrepreneurs.While I look forward to celebrating the day when Innovation Games® has cross the chasm, right now I’m very content to realize that the games have managed to get across the first gap in the curve: the gap between Innovators / Technology Enthusiasts and Early Adopters.

As Moore points out, crossing this first gap is not trivial. It requires that Visionary early adopters see the potential for an “order-of-magnitude” improvement in solving a previously unsolved problem. In our case, our Early Adopter/Visionary customers are finding the the games are helping them solve key problems in a number of different areas. To illustrate what I mean, consider how some of the Visionaries (speakers) in the Agile Community are using, or recommending, the games:

• Alistair Cockburn recommended Buy a Feature to help teams prioritize their backlog;
• Tom Grant, from Forrester, played Prune the Product Tree online during his session to help people playing the role of Product Manager / Product Owner gain a deeper understanding of the needs of different stakeholders;
• Cory Foy, from NetObjectives, played Speed Boat to help illustrate the challenges with distributed teams;
• Michele Sliger played the Team Estimation game, a specially tailored version of Buy a Feature that helps teams manage their commitments;
• Michael Sahota from Agilitrix and Gino Marckx included Buy a Feature and Speed Boat in their session;
• Cory Foy and I played Prune the Product Tree and debuted a new game, My Worst Nightmare, at our session.

And this doesn’t even count the many trained facilitators at the conference, or the number of people who stopped me to share their stories about using the games to solve hard problems. My own estimate is that at least 10% of the Agile 2010 conference attendees have used the games  to solve complex problems through collaborative play.

Of course, the Agile conference is an insignificantly small sample of the number of teams around the world who are writing software using Agile. And to project from our experiences at the Agile conference into the larger world is, admittedly, a bit grand. But, I am an entrepreneur, and our vision is indeed very grand. And, based on the continuing global adoption of serious games around the world, I’m happy to say that we’ve made it across the first gap in the technology adoption lifecycle. (Careful: I’m switching from Innovation Games to the larger category of serious games).

To illustrate what I mean, consider this: I submitted the proposal for the Innovation Games book to O’Reilly in 2005. It was rejected. Fortunately for me, Greg Doench from Addison-Wesley acted as true Innovator / Technology Enthusiast, and published the book. Now, O’Reilly has just published Gamestorming, the excellent book on serious games Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo. That’s a big change in a few years. (And no, I’m not slamming O’Reilly – I actually think that O’Reilly is a really innovative company, and of course Tim O’Reilly is a genius on a number of topics. That said, I think O’Reilly did miss the early wave of serious games, though they are catching up fast).

Another example? Compare the number of proposals for SXSW 2011 that mention serious games. Compare that with the number of proposals mentioning serious games just a few years ago.

When you take these and countless other facts into question, is says that serious games, and Innovation Games, have crossed the first step. We’re in the Early Majority. And, while I’m thrilled that we’ve gotten this far, we look forward to earning the right to try crossing the chasm.