Join us on 3-4 November, 2011 for our Innovation Games® for Customer Understanding course in London.

Date: 3-4 November 2011

Timing: 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM

Location: London, UK

Venue: Hilton London Islington Hotel

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

Instructors

Luke Hohmann, CEO and founder of The Innovation Games Company, is the inventor of Innovation Games® and a recognized expert on the use of serious games to solve complex business problems. Luke is currently a member of the Agile Alliance and has been involved in the agile community for more than a decade. He is also a senior advisor to OpenView Venture Partners.  Luke has written three books and numerous articles on software product management. He is also a member of the PDMA, the ACM and the IEEE. 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.

Ant Clay is Chief Strategy Officer at 21apps and is an Innovation Games® Qualified Instructor, Trained Facilitator and one of a new breed of ‘business technology consultants’. Working with clients to innovate and align technology investments to organizational outcomes whilst changing the way they work through the use of facilitation, visualization, Serious Games and organizational storytelling. Known to ask clients repeatedly “Why?” until they breakdown and admit “they just don’t know”. Ant consults, coaches and speaks on a range of topics including SharePoint, collaboration and innovation technology platforms, Governance, business aligned technology solutions and delivers a number of innovative training and workshop sessions.

Andrew Woodward is a developer by heart, with a wealth of experience in mentoring and leading agile teams. He has taken this learning and experience and expanded it with emergent thinking, dialog mapping, and serious games enabling him to really help organizations understand the rationale behind decisions and ask the tough question ‘Why’ and how to measure the benefit. Through his enthusiasm and application Andrew has promoted innovative techniques to the SharePoint community and has been awarded Microsoft MVP award for his community contributions. He is also founder of 21apps.