Modern product development practices, especially those that focus on innovative products and services, place great emphasis on having development teams work directly with customers. This is good news, for the foundation of innovation is a genuine understanding of your customers needed, and then using this understanding to create more effective ways of solving their problems.

This two-day, interactive course, based on the material in Luke Hohmann's Innovation Games book, tackles the challenge of developing customer understanding by providing you with a fresh perspective on how to use a variety of games with your customers to develop the understanding that forms the foundation of innovation. You’ll find that if you use them, you’ll come to understand what your customers really want. You’ll have fun doing it. Perhaps more importantly, they’ll have fun doing it. Armed with this understanding, you’ll be able to create the breakthrough, innovative products that are the foundation of lasting success.

Areas where you can use Innovation Games:

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

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

The Innovation Games training includes the most recent breakthrough finding of Gamestorming a book by Visual Thinking and Creative Thinking guru Dave Gray. Great things don't happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? This course includes:

• Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented games
• Improve collaboration and communication with visual-thinking techniques
• Promote understanding by role playing customer and user experience
• Generate better ideas and more of them – faster than ever before
• Shorten meetings and make them more productive
• Stimulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamics
• Identify a problem’s root cause and find the paths that point toward a solution

And trust me, it's serious fun!