Copyright: 2007
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
ISBN: 0-321-43729-2

The underlying principles of Luke Hohmann's Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play are rock solid.  Either Hohmann has a solid grasp of marketing principles, project management and cognitive psychology, or he is pretty good at buzz-word bingo.  This is an intensely practical book without much meat so if you are looking for a "how-to" manual on getting good ideas from your customers, this book is for you.  If you are looking for insight into why these kinds of activities work or how you can design your own "games", you will come away feeling pretty empty.

Markets don't stand still

One piece of insight that I loved in this book was that market research must be a constant thing.  You can't "do market research" and then move on to something else.  Simply put, markets aren't static thus if you research the market today, your research will be partially invalidated by tomorrow. 

I have watched product owners and managers fight to implement ideas or features based on research that is 6 to 12 months old or even older.  If you had a product idea a year ago and you are now wanting to implement, you really need to look at the landscape again.  A year ago, a website where you could easily update your status from the field via a cellphone would have been a great idea.  Today we have Twitter and it would be cheaper and easier to make Twitter work for you. 

The Games

OK... not all the games, just the ones I thought were most useful and a little blurb about them.  If you want to know more about the games you should buy the book. 

  • Remember the Future - Excellent game for forcing people to think about the results they want to achieve
  • Spider Web - Great for understanding how your software might interact with other pieces of a person's life
  • Buy a Feature - Forces people to place a value on a feature.  Interestingly the idea of "pricing" is built into Hohmann's version of the game
  • The Apprentice - Doing a cognitive task analysis on someone using your product could lead to great insight
  • 20 / 20 Vision - I like the idea of force-ranking feature sets to make people think critically about them
Conclusion

Not being a fan of pop-business books, I can't say I recommend this book.  No doubt Hohmann is an incredible consultant and if you need help with product development and innovation you should certainly look into hiring him.  The problem with this book is that it is a "how-to" manual.  Where Gary Klein is too deep to be practical sometimes, Hohmann is too shallow to be interesting.  Case in point was the discussion on what to do if too many customers from one company show up to play a particular game.  He devotes a number of bullet points and almost a full page to helping you solve the dilemma.  No offense but if you need to read bullet points on how to figure that one out, you probably shouldn't be in charge of product development.  As always, I prefer books that explain the "why" over books that tell me "how".