Join us on December 18th-19th, 2012 for a Innovation Games® for Customer Understanding course in Mountain View.

Date: November 18th-19th, 2012

Timing: 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM

Location: Mountain View, CA

Venue: 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 bookInnovation 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. He is also a former National Junior Pairs Figure Skating Champion, as well as a certified aerobics instructor. In his spare time, Luke likes roughhousing with his four kids and his wife’s cooking. He also enjoys long runs in the Santa Cruz mountains to burn off his wife’s cooking.