Innovation Games How To: Project Organizer from Brett McCallon on Vimeo.

You know how it is–you work and work to produce a great product, and you get people excited about it, and you and only later realize that you’ve kind of forgotten to explain somewhere on the website exactly how everything works.

Yeah. Sorry about that.

Consider this video, then, the first of many ways in which we plan to make it up to our loyal users (and newcomers to the Innovation Games Online experience.  We’re planning to add audio to these in the future, but plan to keep all of them short and sweet (no more than two minutes in length), so that you can learn exactly what you need to know, and get back to playing games as quickly as possible.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this video, and please let us know if there are any particular areas of the site where you could use some help–we’ll prioritize our backlog to help you as quickly as possible.

3Back’s Doug Shimp and Luke Hohmann are teaching a Certified Scrum Product Owner with Innovation Games class in Austin, TX on September 1-2. During this two-day interactive class, participants will learn about Scrum’s Product Owner role, which focuses on visioning, roadmapping and user stories, along with an in-depth discussion of and practice with Innovation Games and they can be used in this context.

For more information on the class and to register, click here.

Innovation Games: Software-Powered Innovation Through Collaborative Play
September 1, 2010; 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Austin Community College, Highland Business Center Campus, Room 201.0, 5930 Middle Fiskville Rd.
Register: http://lukehohmann.eventbrite.com

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.

Luke Hohmann, CEO and Founder of The Innovation Games® Company, will be leading an interactive learning session, “Bridging the Gap: Linking Strategic Roadmaps to Tactical Project Plans,” at PMI Silicon Valley’s Annual Symposium. This interactive session will provide project, program and product managers with the tools they need to link strategic, forward-planning roadmaps with tactical project plans.

Topics covered include:

• Practical Techniques to improve your stakeholder alignment and project prioritization
• Innovation Games® to increase collaboration and innovation on your projects
• Hands-on experience in using both in-person and online versions of the Innovation Games® Prune the Product Tree and Buy a Feature.
• A clear understanding of The Innovation Games® Company Collaboratize(SM) process, which has been endorsed by leading organizations such as the Scrum Alliance.

For more information and to register, click here.

Mountain View, CA – August 11, 2010. Alistair Cockburn, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, Luke Hohmann, CEO and Founder of The Innovation Games® Company and Jeff Patton, creator of The Passionate Product Owner have joined forces to create a new one-day in-depth seminar entitled, “All Fluff No Stuff: Just People Inventing, Communicating, Deciding” to be held this fall in Chicago, IL on December 8, 2010 and Dallas, TX on December 7, 2010.

“All Fluff No Stuff isn’t about fancy processes or fancy tools,” said Cockburn. “This seminar focuses on you, your colleagues, pen and paper, and the best ideas about how to create great products and great projects together.”

“According to some, that’s all fluff,” continued Hohmann. “According to the sharpest designers in the world, that’s where the real stuff lies.”

The seminar’s world-class curriculum is designed to enable attendees to learn how to work better together, hone their ideas and create a kick-ass product. Sessions include Cockburn’s Reflective Improvement game, Patton’s User Story Mapping course and Hohmann’s Innovation Games®, along with a panel discussion and Q&A.

“Our goal for this one-day event is to provide attendees with new, more effective ways to work with your teammates and create killer products,” said Patton. “You will learn to invent jointly, communicate more clearly and decide collaboratively.”

Registration for this one-day premium event is just $800 and attendance is limited to 40 registrants per location. For more information and to register, got to http://allfluffdallas.eventbrite.com/ and http://allfluff.eventbrite.com/.

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About The Innovation Games® Company
The Innovation Games Company is the leading producer of online and in-person serious games and consulting services. Innovation Games® are the seriously fun way to do serious work, providing collaborative methods and tools for understanding what customers and markets need. Innovation Games Online delivers real-time collaboration across the Internet. To learn more, visit www.InnovationGames.com.

Mountain View, CA – August 10, 2010. The Innovation Games® Company, the leading producer of online and in-person serious games and consulting services, today announced the release of a brand new Innovation Game® entitled My Worst Nightmare. My Worst Nightmare, a new addition to the 12 in-person Innovation Games invented by Founder and CEO Luke Hohmann and detailed in his book Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products through Collaborative Play, is designed to help individuals and organizations elucidate hidden and/or unconsidered aspects of worst-case scenarios in order to develop better understanding and planning.

My Worst Nightmare has been used by individuals at varied levels of the enterprise (including executives) and was previewed by such organizations as the IP Business Congress in Munich in June 2010 and the Confluence 2010 conference.

“My Worst Nightmare was a logical choice for a series of games held at the IP Business Conference,” said Hohmann. “Industry leaders and IP executives from such companies as EADS/Airbus, Rockwell Collins and Thomson Reuters participated in parallel games, elucidating their worst nightmare C-level exec or CIPO. The game’s structure and metaphor produced key insights and pertinent issues related to the roles and responsibilities of Chief Intellectual Property Officers.”

Other recent uses of the game include an analysis of working with outside vendors and partners in order to uncover and prevent miscommunication and inefficiencies.

In addition to My Worst Nightmare, the Innovation Games team is also working on a new game targeting mobile platform, to be first released for the iPad. This mobile game is a complement to the Innovation Games Online platform, which launched in July 2009. Innovation Games Online includes four real-time Innovation Games, Buy a Feature Online, Prune the Product Tree Online, Speedboat Online and Design Your Own Visual Game. Buy A Feature is an online prioritization game that brings together groups of users to collectively decide which product features are most valuable, while Prune the Product Tree, Speedboat and Design Your Own Visual Game function as visual wikis, allowing participants to visually collaborate on ideation.

For more information on My Worst Nightmare, the impending iPad release or Innovation Games Online, contact Luke Hohmann at lhohmann@innovationgame.com

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About The Innovation Games® Company
The Innovation Games Company is the leading producer of online and in-person serious games and consulting services. Innovation Games® are the seriously fun way to do serious work, providing collaborative methods and tools for understanding what customers and markets need. Innovation Games Online delivers real-time collaboration across the Internet. To learn more, visit www.InnovationGames.com.

Mountain View, CA – August 10, 2010. The Innovation Games® Company, the leading producer of online and in-person serious games and consulting services, today announced the integration of its software solution with Rally’s® Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution. The integration enables users of Rally’s software solution to utilize the Innovation Games Online platform to facilitate collaboration and prioritization of user stories. The online integration allows Rally customers to take advantage of real-time, interactive, online games to solve complex collaboration and prioritization problems without the added cost or complexity of bringing participants physically together.

Rally users are able to select stories and export them into Innovation Games Online’s virtual market game Buy a Feature. They can then set up and play Buy a Feature to prioritize stories and import the results back into Rally’s ALM platform. This interaction allows users to keep pace with changing requirements and market needs.

“At Rally, we’ve always given teams the tools they need to collaborate and meet commitments,” said Ryan Martens, Rally’s founder and CTO. “This integration with Innovation Games Online gives our customers an effective and easy way to dramatically improve collaboration and prioritization during the planning phase.”

Innovation Games Online launched in July 2009, and was highlighted in a recent Forrester report (“Serious Games to Uncover Serious Requirements”) as a leader in the serious games industry for helping businesses “do work.” The online game platform currently includes four real-time Innovation Games—Buy a Feature Online, Prune the Product Tree Online, Speedboat Online and Design Your Own Visual Game. The online games are based on Luke Hohmann’s book Innovation Games®: Creating Breakthrough Products through Collaborative Play. Buy A Feature is an online prioritization game that brings together groups of users to collectively decide which product features are most valuable, while the other three games function as visual wikis, allowing participants to visually collaborate on ideation. More online Innovation Games are in the works, including games targeting mobile platforms, including the iPhone and iPad.

“The Innovation Games Company has long supported the agile community, and we’re thrilled to integrate Innovation Games Online with Rally. Thousands of companies and tens of thousands of projects worldwide use Rally’s solution to increase productivity and speed time-to-market,” said Luke Hohmann, CEO and founder of The Innovation Games Company. “The integration with Innovation Games Online can help these teams effectively collaborate and prioritize stories, ensuring the product in development keeps pace with agile’s dramatically faster pace of development.”

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About The Innovation Games® Company
The Innovation Games Company is the leading producer of online and in-person serious games and consulting services. Innovation Games® are the seriously fun way to do serious work, providing collaborative methods and tools for understanding what customers and markets need. Innovation Games® Online delivers real-time collaboration across the Internet. To learn more, visit www.InnovationGames.com.

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Rally and Rally Software Development are registered trademarks of Rally Software Development Corp.

The answer is a resounding yes! A great example of this is the games I produced in Feb – June, 2010 that invited senior executives from a variety of organizations to explore key issues facing Chief Intellectual Property Officers (CIPOs). This was a great example of how online games can work in concert with in-person games to generate truly unique results.

The first part of this project was conducted in April 2010, in which CIPOs from around the world used the online Innovation Game® Buy a Feature to CIPOs to select the key issues that they wanted to get feedback on from CIPO experts during in-person games scheduled for the IP Business Conference in Munich during June. At the end of the these games, four topics stood out:

• IP strategy in business. Best practices for working with senior management to improve their understanding of the strategic use of IP assets.
• Improving realisation of IP. How CIPOs demonstrate that well-managed IP programmes can increase corporate market value.
• Increasing IP licensing revenue. The ways in which CIPOs can help maximise licensing income, and manage expectations of this.
• Engaging the workforce. Ensuring that the entire workforce is properly educated about and engaged with creating, protecting and leveraging corporate IP assets.

On Sunday 20th June – just prior to the start of the IPBC in Munich – a group of CIPOs got together to discuss these topics. I invite you to look at this amazing list of senior executives and thought leaders. The were:

• David Berdan, Invista;
• Joe Beyers of Ambature (formerly at HP);
• Bill Elkington, Rockwell Collins;
• Paul Fehlner, Novartis;
• Wulf Hoeflich, EADS/Airbus;
• François Jamet, IdVectoR (formerly with France Telecom);
• Wim Klop, DSM;
• Ruud Peters, Philips;
• Béatrix de Russé, Technicolor (Thomson SA);
• Andrew Sant, Crown Technology; and
• Joseph Villella, Infineon.

These CIPOs were joined by eight IP industry experts:

• Jens Bördin, CIP Professional Services;
• Dave Brown, Thomson Reuters;
• Bo Heiden, Qatar Science & Tech Park;
• Michael Lasinski, 284 Partners;
• Ron Laurie, Inflexion Point Strategy;
• Ada Nielsen, LES USA & Canada;
• Ulf Petrusson, CIP; and
• David Yurkerwich, Charles River Associates.

The results of this project, including our report, was made public by our client, Joff Wild of IAM Magazine. You can read all about this project and download the report here.

The main point is that these senior executives loved playing the games and produced amazing results. You’ll find that you get similarly great results when you play the games with your executives.

And it is giving me nightmares. Nightmares about software and technology development organizations getting better, and better, and BETTER at improving their processes. In my nightmare, these development machines hum at a perfect sustainable pace of optimal velocity. They are lean, mean, done, done, done, done DAMMIT I’M DONE code machines that chews through backlogs and demands to be fed more… and more… and more…

I wake up in a cold sweat, wondering about the customer, and reflecting on the sage advice that my friend Guy Kawasaki (Guy wrote the foreword to my second book, Beyond Software Architecture) taught us so eloquently in The Macintosh Way:

It is not enough to do do things right (Agile, or post-Agile, or whatever is after Agile).

You have to do the right thing.

AND you have to do things right.

Which means you need to focus on identifying the problems your customers are facing and creating solutions that solve this problems. Total and complete solutions. Solutions that entail the right marketing, sales, communication, support, pricing, licensing, and support. Yeah, the whole thing.

That’s one of the primary uses of Innovation Games®. The games enable you to better understand yourself and our customers in all of these dimensions. Simply put, the games help you do the right thing. And these are the things that come before – and after – Agile. But definitely before.

Are these things hard? Heck ya. Take our little company. While we’re continually proud of our software and how it is improving every release (hey – the new version allows you to add players to the game while it is being played – and yeah, that’s AWESOME), we know that we have a lot of work to do. So, we keep at it. We keep trying to do the right thing. And we keep trying to do things right.

For my Agile friends, I invite you to consider that perhaps post-Agile isn’t what we should be talking about. Instead, perhaps what we should be talking about is pre-Agile: What comes before development? How are we creating our backlog? What evidence do we have that we’re building the right thing?

For those of you attending Agile 2010 (yes, that’s me on the home page in the lower right wearing the black “I PLAN TO RE-PLAN” T-Shirt) talk with any of the almost 100 Innovation Games® Trained Facilitators that will be at the conference. All of them will be happy to discuss how the games can help you avoid your own post-agile-apocalyptic nightmare.