Join us on October 29-30, 2012 for our Innovation Games® for Customer Understanding course in Toronto, ON, Canada.

Date: October 29-30, 2012

Timing: 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM

Location: Toronto, ON, Canada.

Venue: Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Ave

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

Michael has been helping clients with Innovation Games® since 2008 to achieve break-through results. As a independent Certified Scrum Coach at Agilitrix, Michael has been helping clients build high performance organizations. 

Michael is internationally recognized as an Agile thought leader through his book, regular conference presentations and selection as a top Agile blogger. Most recently, he has spoken at Agile 2012 and given a keynote at Agile Games 2012 on the Landscape of Games and Play.

Michael's passion unleashing creativity and achieve breakthrough results through Play. In addition to a variety of games and simulations, he is also trained in StrategicPlay® with Lego® SERIOUS PLAY®.

Michael has also recently publish the book, An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide.