Innovation Through Understanding^sm

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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 17 Ratings

Save Your Money: Book is Just a Long Infomercial for the Author - 2007-03-09
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Some of the ideas, while creative, are just repackaging of many well-known and established techniques.

In addition, there is one reality the author ignores. The exercises are not going to work well with "average," everyday people. They require a degree of creativity and acumen that quite honestly, most people (including very well-educated ones) just do not possess. I work in this industry everyday and if there is one thing I've learned it is most individuals are much better reacting to ideas than creating them.

Excellent, practical, extremely effective - 2007-07-16
Reviewer Rating:
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 educational policies and practices?
What if adolescent are treated "seriously", when being serious is a barrier to learning?
Hohmann's exported the "learning by playing" environment from kindergarten to market research and other fields.
The panoply of games he proposed support an ample variety of opportunities.
I'm glad I dedicated the time to read Innovation Games, and organized to use them.
Let life be fun!

Better Understand Your Customer and Discover Great Products - 2009-05-02
Reviewer Rating:
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. In "Innovation Games" Luke Hohmann describes 12 games you can play to help you better understand your customers' needs and help you discover great products.

In part I, Luke first provides an overview for understanding and implementing innovation games. He then discusses the process from selecting the game to interpreting the results.

In part 2, twelve separate games are described which can help you understand one or more of the following:
- Unmet and/or idealized market needs
- Products and services usage and relationships
- Product and service functionality
- How to shape your product for the future

Finally, in part 3 tools and templates are provided to help you quickly start playing innovation games with your customers.

In a world where the mantras of "innovate" and "listen to your customer" prevail, Luke Hohmann gives you usable tools to help you do just that.

I judge how good a book is by how many 3M sticky notes I have stuck to pages. For me, this book had tons. - 2009-03-09
Reviewer Rating:
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.

New ideas are everywhere, finding how to develop them to become a market success is the challenge - 2008-03-05
Reviewer Rating:
We had been using Innovation Games to find the real market of hundred of ideas that companies in our program are developing. It is amazing, how a simple game can be a powerful tool to develop marketing strategies. Our companies had learned the magic of seating with their customers and play games, and then new products are developed. The cost of doing this learning is very low and the results are so big that reading this book has the highest ROI that you can image. Never less, playing the games are very valuable when you read from the book, the real learning experience is when you play them several times or you are able to bring an expert consultant that gave you the insights of the experience.

Reading the book is half of the story, you must play several of these games to take the best experience. I highly suggest trying it.

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