Here's an overdue report on a book put out this year by Adapative Path, a product experience strategy and design consulting firm. Their blog is a great source of info on ideas and approaches to innovative product development. This year they released the book Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World (O'Reilly). The book outlines the trend of using the customer experience to inform the entire product design and development process and reviews the associated attitudinal and cultural changes necessary to embrace this approach to new product development. Here's a quick overview of some of the book's main points from a few of the early chapters.
Our fourth Harvard Business Publishing business simulation is the Back Bay Battery Strategic Innovation simulation (see earlier posts for descriptions of our Pricing, Leadership and Operations Management simulations). This tool simulates the challenges around innovation and risk that face product development managers who need to balance financial goals against the need to innovate, capitalize on new product/market opportunities, and guard against disruptive technologies. Students must evaluate resource requirements, product performance, investment timing, and end-market opportunities for new technology in the context of nebulous market information and constraining financial performance criteria.
I wanted to flag an interesting group that has formed to study the learning impact associated with gaming and promote the innovation of games in education: The Learning Games Network. The group's website describes its mission:
The Learning Games Network is a non-profit organization established to spark innovation in the design and use of learning games through:
A network of scholars, teachers, producers, and game designers committed to the development and distribution of new games informed by research in the learning sciences across a complete range of subject areas from electrostatics to Shakespeare;
The development and distribution of model activities, informal and formal curricular, and teacher training resources to support the use of all games for learning; and
Evangelism and business development programs to help meet growing student and teacher demand for new commercial and open tools that better support individual and collaborative learning in the 21st Century.
My fellow Harvard Technology, Innovation and Education alumnus Andy Blanco is heading up program and business development for the group, which also includes gaming education heavyweights Kurt Squire, Scot Osterweil, and Eric Klopfer. These are the same folks behind the Education Arcade, so I'm not sure what the distinction is -- probably something to do with a new organization to correspond with new funding opportunities.
Much of our work developing new eProducts at Harvard Business Publishing has focused on our web-based business simulations. But we also have a catalog of paper-based role plays in the areas of negotiation, organizational behavior, etc. These are face-to-face activities where students are paired up, allowing them to experiment with negotiation and decision-making skills under the guidance of an instructor and their peers. We knew that these role plays were also powerful examples of experiential learning that extended the power of the case method of teaching. But these paper-based, face-to-face role play simulations are hard to administer -- they require breaking the class into the appropriate roles ("landlord" and "tenant", for instance), segmenting the class into teams or pairs (landlord 1 vs. tenant 1, landlord 2 vs. tenant 2), then organizing the distribution of role-specific and step-specific instructions (step 1 - landlords read their unique, confidential instructions and tentants read their unique, confidential instructions; step 2 - pairs negotiate; step 3 - class debrief). We developed the RolePlanner online platform to facilitate the administration of these multi-step, multi-role activities.
