refQuest

About This Game

Innovation can be understood as the process where something new and valuable to a society is created and an economic advantage can be taken. Innovation is a key to the competitiveness of the European Industry. Ideation is considered as the first and very important stage of the innovation process and is oriented towards the discovery of ideas. Ideation is hard work and only a few ideas reach the final stage of innovation. The refQuest game supports a structured way of developing ideas. It encourages to think in new ways and motivates the player to overcome the frustration when an idea does not emerge fast enough. refQuest is a multiple player game supporting business professionals in the ideation phase of strategic innovation projects and has been developed in the Laboranova project. The underlying concept is based on the principle of reframing the question, which allows a structured idea generation and evaluation for a given business problem. The refQuest game scenario needs to be adapted to the specific business case, which is in our example a window manufacturer who is in search of new and innovative features for the next generation of their products. The twelve players follow a structured process in which they generate and evaluate individual ideas. The final result is a commonly created list of favourite ideas and their descriptions. Players adapt to a role like “rational thinker” or “emotional criticiser” in order to spark creativity in idea generation. Playing this game with twelve players generates in total 42 documented ideas.

Target group

Business Professionals

Platform

  • refQuest follows a server-client model.
  • The server is connected to a network/internet is running on the bemog engine.
  • The client requires no special software except a Web browser.
  • A PC with currently popular standard equipment is absolutely sufficient for use.

Number of Players

The number of players is 12. All players have a different role in the context of a window innovation project.

How it Works

Each of the players logs into the game at the same time.

The players are divided into two groups.

Each group commonly follows a process to develop new ideas for the innovation of windows.

Beside following the process the players can interact with each other by the integrated chat system or any other means (direct, phone, email, …).

Each of the players have a role describing how they should behave within the game and which additional information they possibly have.

The process for each group consists of the following steps:

– Select a viewpoint for idea generation. One of the players of each group selects a view point for that group.

– Individual idea generation: Each of the players provide three ideas documented by a short and a long description.

– Common idea generation: The players discuss their ideas and select the most promising ones per group.

– Idea rating: Each group rates the three best ideas of the other group.

– Summarizing: All ideas including their rating are displayed for documentation purposes.

The process can be observed by a game master.

The game master can initiate events which my rewinds the process.

The game is over when the three best ideas per group have been identified.