or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
Express Checkout with PayPhrase
What's this? | Create PayPhrase
Sorry!
More Buying Choices
32 used & new from $16.49

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play
 
See larger image
 
Tell the Publisher!
I’d like to read this book on Kindle

Don’t have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.
 
  

Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play (Paperback)

~ (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

List Price: $44.99
Price: $26.64 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
You Save: $18.35 (41%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Want it delivered Wednesday, November 11? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
18 new from $22.63 14 used from $16.49

Frequently Bought Together

Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play + Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition) + Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck
Price For All Three: $51.74

Show availability and shipping details

  • This item: Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play by Luke Hohmann

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details

  • Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition) by Michael Michalko

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck by Michael Michalko

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck

Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck

by Michael Michalko
4.7 out of 5 stars (11)  $11.53
The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator

The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator

by Rich Mironov
4.6 out of 5 stars (7)  $21.95
Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want

Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want

by Curtis R. Carlson
Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great

by Esther Derby
4.4 out of 5 stars (21)  $19.77
Rapid Problem Solving with Post-It Notes

Rapid Problem Solving with Post-It Notes

by David Straker
4.5 out of 5 stars (17)  $14.04
Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Innovation Through Understandingsm

 

The toughest part of innovation? Accurately predicting what customers want, need, and will pay for. Even if you ask them, they often can’t explain what they want. Now, there’s a breakthrough solution: Innovation Games. Drawing on his software product strategy and product management consulting experience, Luke Hohmann has created twelve games that help you uncover your customers’ true, hidden needs and desires.

 

You’ll learn what each game will accomplish, why it works, and how to play it with customers. Then, Hohmann shows how to integrate the results into your product development processes, helping you focus your efforts, reduce your costs, accelerate time to market, and deliver the right solutions, right from the start.

  • Learn how your customers define success
  • 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

Innovation Games will be indispensable for anyone who wants to drive more successful, customer-focused product development: product and R&D managers, CTOs and development leaders, marketers, and senior business executives alike.



About the Author

Luke Hohmann is the founder and CEO of Enthiosys, Inc., a Silicon Valley-based software product strategy and management consulting firm. Luke is also the author of Beyond Software Architecture: Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions and Journey of the Software Professional: A Sociology of Software Development. 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. While at Michigan he studied cognitive psychology and organizational behavior in addition to data structures and artificial intelligence. He is a former National Junior Pairs Figure Skating Champion and American College of Sports Medicine certified aerobics instructor. A member of the PDMA, ACM, and IEEE, in his spare time he enjoys roughhousing with his four kids, his wife’s cooking, and long runs in the Santa Cruz mountains (because he really does enjoy his wife’s cooking).


Product Details

  • Paperback: 192 pages
  • Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (September 7, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0321437292
  • ISBN-13: 978-0321437297
  • Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.8 x 0.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #270,044 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

More About the Author

Luke Hohmann
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Visit Amazon's Luke Hohmann Page

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?


Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

 

Customer Reviews

17 Reviews
5 star:
 (15)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (17 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars find the unknown unknowables, September 12, 2006
By W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
There's an amusing but cogent passage in this book, where Hohmann talks about things you know, things you know you don't know, and things you don't know you don't know. This exactly echoes what Donald Rumsfeld said recently about knowables, unknown knowables and unknown unknowables. Rumsfeld was talking about terrorist threats against the US, while Hohmann is describing your company's marketplace. The main purpose of this book is to try to move items from the category of things you don't know you don't know into the category of things you know you don't know. As Hohmann points out, in the latter, you actually have some knowledge about whatever that subject is. You can then apply other methods to reduce your ignorance about the subject.

The Innovation Games is a methodology for getting your customers to role play their experiences, in a search for what they might want in a future improved product. Or for deficiencies in your current products. There is nothing in this approach to limit it to high technology products or services. It can be germane to any industry.

Perhaps the main appeal of Innovation Games is that it can engender more creative input and feedback from your customers. It goes beyond asking them to fill out survey forms. These are often constrained by you having to devise the questions. And for the unknown unknowables, you simply will not be able to formulate questions about those. Beyond giving space for the respondent to write any other concerns she might have. The problem with the latter is that many respondents might also be unaware of those unknowables. The Innovation Games is a process whereby sometimes these hard unknowables can be made explicit in the multiplayer role playing. No guarantees. But sometimes it can be worth the effort.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Skinning the Onion on Customer Needs, November 26, 2006
By David W. Smith (Silicon Valley) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
With the disclaimer that I worked with Luke while some of the ideas that turned into the Games where bouncing around in his head, I have seen these games work to produce tangible results. (We used an early version of Remember the Future to develop the successful plan for our first product deployment.)

In "Blink", Malcom Gladwell makes the point that if you ask people what they want, they will tell you what they *think* they want. (When asked, nobody thought they wanted the Aeron chair. Oops.) It takes a bit of digging to get beneath the thought level, tapping into real emotional wants and needs to extract ideas for products that stand a chance of being wildly successful. The Innovation Games help with that digging, engaging players above and below the level of concious thought.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Likely to lead to innovative ideas for your next product, November 12, 2006
One of the challenges in new product innovation is that the process cannot be broken down into a simple sequence of steps. "Follow these six steps" is not advice that will lead to the breakthrough thinking and innovative ideas that lead to best-selling new products or enhancements to existing products.

"Innovation Games" acknowledges that innovation and creativity do not come from following a predefined sequence of steps but from pushing ourselves to thinking about products, users, and usage scenarios in different ways. One of my favorite techniques from this book is the idea of thinking of a product or service as a speed boat with an assortment of attached anchors, each representing something that a customer doesn't like about the product or service.

Playing the games described in this book will almost certainly lead you to better and more innovative product ideas.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Better Understand Your Customer and Discover Great Products
It isn't the job of your customer to translate their needs into your product offerings. Of course, everyone says you just need to listen to your customer, but no one says how. Read more
Published 6 months ago by John Gibbon

5.0 out of 5 stars I judge how good a book is by how many 3M sticky notes I have stuck to pages. For me, this book had tons.
Great book. I judge the quality of the books I read by how many 3M sticky notes I have stuck to pages. This book had tons.
Published 8 months ago by Ryan Peel

5.0 out of 5 stars New ideas are everywhere, finding how to develop them to become a market success is the challenge
We had been using Innovation Games to find the real market of hundred of ideas that companies in our program are developing. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Jorge Zavala

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, practical, extremely effective
Luke Hohmann's Innovation Games makes current paradigm obsolete.
What if the decay in the learning rate from kindergarten to high school is not only related to wrong... Read more
Published on July 16, 2007 by Jose Pedro S. Pagano

1.0 out of 5 stars Save Your Money: Book is Just a Long Infomercial for the Author
Most of the content of this book belongs in sales brochure not a book. A large proportion of this book is a long, overblown ad for the author's services. Read more
Published on March 9, 2007 by ksrp

5.0 out of 5 stars Gets to the Creative part of the Brain
The process of eliciting requirements suffers from some of the same problems as the process of collecting information for expert systems. Read more
Published on February 21, 2007 by Geri Winters

5.0 out of 5 stars Another great read by Luke Hohmann
Luke Hohmann provides us with yet another wonderful read! Innovation Games is full of great ways to connect with your customers to discover what is truly important to them. Read more
Published on November 22, 2006 by I. Marzura

5.0 out of 5 stars Too important to take seriously!
Business, like life, is too important to take seriously! Cockburn described software development as a "cooperative game," XP gave us the "planning game," and now Hohmann... Read more
Published on November 17, 2006 by C. Haskins

5.0 out of 5 stars INNOVATION GAMES: CREATING BREAKTHROUGH PRODUCTS THROUGH COLLABORATIVE PLAY tailors games to results.
This wide-ranging book could also have been reviewed in our computer or business sections, but is featured here for its additional interest to any interested in links between... Read more
Published on November 6, 2006 by Midwest Book Review

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical guide for facilitating creative brainstorming
There is a fundamental problem with going out to customers and asking them "what would you like to see in the next product? Read more
Published on October 20, 2006 by Daniel Shefer

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 

Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   




Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)


Look for Similar Items by Category


Look for Similar Items by Subject

 

Feedback

If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us.
 Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Is there any other feedback you would like to provide?

Your comments can help make our site better for everyone.


Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.