Join us May 2-3, 2012 New York City for Gear Stream's first Innovation Games® - Customer Understanding workshop.

Date: May 2-3, 2012

Time: 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM Each Day

Location: Manhattan - TBD

Course Description

Long before gamification, gamestorming and serious games became the latest buzz words, Luke Hohmann and his team were using a variety of serious games, Innovation Games®, to help companies like SAP, Qualcomm, Cisco, Reed Elsevier and Yahoo! build breakthrough products & services. These games (originally outlined in Luke's groundbreaking book, Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products through Collaborative Play - enable you to work directly with your customers, eliciting unique insight into what they truly want from your product or service.

This two-day courses will teach you how to:

• Discover what customers don't like about your offerings 
  
• Uncover unspoken needs & breakthrough opportunities 
  
• Understand where your offerings fit into your customers' operations
  
• Clarify exactly how & when customers will use your product or service 
  
• Deliver the right new features & make better strategy decisions 
  
• Increase empathy for the customers' experience within your organization 
  
• Improve the effectiveness of the sales & service organizations 
  
• Identify your most effective marketing messages and sellable features

Target Audience

• Product managers/directors
• Marketing managers 
• Market research professionals
• Executive Management
• Agile Coaches/Team Leads
• Software engineers/developers/architects
  
• Anyone interested in driving more successful, customer-focused product development
  

Benefits

Upon completing this course, participants will be able to use Innovation Games® in their Voice of the Customer, new product development and ongoing product development processes to collaboratively identify, shape and prioritize breakthrough products and services.

Content Outline

• Discussion of Innovation Games and Market Research
• High-level planning, playing and post-processing Innovation Games
• Detailed planning, playing and post-processing the results of several case studies that enable participants to experience all phases of Innovation Games
• Review and shared discussion; helping participants plan their adoption of these techniques
• Facilitation and presentation skills 

Theory of Instruction

The course is guided by a “learning by doing” model of education: 

• What participants will know after taking the class.
• What participants will do during the seminar to reinforce key concepts.
• What participants will have after the seminar to promote further practice and study.

Prerequisites

Although not strictly required, it is helpful if participants read the book Innovation Games®: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play before the course.

Materials

• Course Presentation
• A variety of handouts used to stimulate thinking and apply the materials
• Case studies

Instructor

Luke Hohmann is the Founder and CEO of The Innovation Games® Company. The author of three books, Luke’s playfully diverse background of life experiences has uniquely prepared him to design and produce serious games. Luke graduated magna cum laude with a B.S.E. in computer engineering and an M.S.E. in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan. In addition to data structures and artificial intelligence, he studied cognitive psychology and organizational behavior.