Innovators' Marketplace

Using Games to Activate and Train Innovators

This book presents a powerful method for innovation that reinforces combinatorial and analogical thoughts, with interdisciplinary communications among stakeholders in the market. In this method called Innovators' Marketplace, two games - Innovators' Market Game and Analogy Game - accelerate the spiral of innovation with visualizing data on the connectivity of pieces of existing knowledge. Some players invent ideas by connecting and combining pre-existing knowledge, while others evaluate the ideas to decide whether or not to buy. In a joyful atmosphere created by the games, players look beyond resistance to criticism, as experiments real cases show. They will start thinking and talking about the best segment of the majority, latent requirements in the future market, and scenarios for satisfying those requirements. This process embodies the principle that an interdisciplinary combination of business actors and resources, possibly with the appearance of new actors, triggers innovation.