Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

Conclusion

I first had the idea to write this book in the summer of 2003 when I was helping QUALCOMM Wireless Business Solutions (QWBS) plan a sales training seminar. The seminar was unique because we were inviting customers to teach the sales team which part of the sales processes had actually worked. That wasn’t going to take all day, so the QWBS planning team asked me, “What else can we do with our customers?”

Not surprisingly, I suggested that we use some of the informal games I had developed to better elicit customer needs and desires. As Joan Waltman described in her foreword, QWBS overcame their initial skepticism and obtained valuable insights from playing the games with their customers. I reflected on our experience, and thought that ...