Last night, we got some excellent "customer input" from our members at the East Bay IT Group Startups and Venture Capital Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting. Tom Johanix facilitated a session where we played two "Innovation Games" developed by Luke Hohmann, product management consulting firm Enthiosys. Innovation Games are a dozen interactive exercises that help to uncover customer needs, product functionality and priorities. I have been working with Enthiosys at a joint client, and during that time, Luke has been bending my ear about Innovation Games for the past year or so, but I had not seen the games in action.
Innovation continues to be a hot topic throughout the technology industry, and Innovation Games is one way of accessing customers' unspoken requirements. In this case, instead of talking about a hypothetical product, we used our monthly entrepreneur SIG meeting as our "product" in order to eat our own dogfood and test the ideas we're teaching--and used two of the Innovation Games to gather customer requirements. I had seen Luke Hohmann present Innovation Games at M.R. Rangaswami's Software 2007 Conference, and though the session was extremely short, was favorably impressed based on all the customer testimonials during that session.
So I thought we would present an educational topic for our entrepreneurial networking group and at the same time, get some feedback about how we can improve the SIG going forward.
We played two games. First, we played Product Box, then we did a quick version of 20:20 Vision to prioritize the ideas that had been genertaed from the Product Box conversation. We identified over 30 topics for future sessions, and the kinds of information that entrepreneurs would most value.
To be honest -- and as I had told Luke -- I was somewhat skeptical that you could put a bunch of markers and boxes on tables and people would engage – but you know, it worked! And I can't speak for everyone, but it sure looked to me like everyone had a good time.
In Product Box, each person developed a mock-up of an actual "product box" -- an actual white cardboard box with the participant's sketches of product functionality and features -- and then each participant was gracious enough to give us a brief presentation "selling" their box to the group while I furiously took down notes about their desired features, benefits and outcomes.
In 20:20 Vision, we took the ideas recorded on large post-it notes, and prioritized them on the wall. The group decided to prioritize based on a show of hands for how many people were interested in each topic or suggested idea. I found seeing the shows of hands as interesting as the first exercise to generate the ideas to begin with. Some ideas that I thought were great, the group didn't like, and thing I didn't think would be very popular got nearly unanimous votes. The #1 item? Storytelling from other entrepreneurs about their successes and disasters.
Not taking anything away from our session evaluation forms -- which we pretty consistently use to survey attendees at the end of each monthly session -- I can count on two hands the number of suggestions for new topics we’ve received from participants in the last two years. None generated anywhere near what we were able to gather tonight, and there was a surprising number of ideas that I would not have thought of before. So for those of you keeping score at home, put a checkmark in the “It works!” column for Innovation Games, as it definitely worked for us. I look forward to working with my co-chair, Holly Nelson from Randick, O'Dea and Tooliatos to incorporate the suggestions in our program over the coming year.
Thanks again to all our members and guests for providing some outstanding feedback. Thanks to Tom Johanix for his great facilitation, and Luke Hohmann of Enthiosys for inventing the Innovation Games. If you are interested in learning more about it, I encourage you to check out Luke's book Innovation Games
