“Videogames often get criticized as a waste of time, but tech companies are using them to solve complex business problems. So-called “serious” games can help businesses understand what their customers need, spark ideas and make key product decisions. One company developing them is Enthiosys, a product consulting firm based in Mountain View, Calif. Its founder and chief executive, Luke Hohmann, recently led a workshop in Chicago for intellectual-property strategists from Microsoft, General Electric, AT&T, Accenture and other companies.

Mr. Hohmann, who’s also the author of “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play,” fielded questions on how serious games work and what businesses can get out of them.

The Wall Street Journal: What are serious games?

Mr. Hohmann: They are games, just like Scrabble or Risk, which product companies use to answer questions about their product lines. People play games to solve problems in a collaborative fashion, and we learn what customers want from the way they play. When people are absorbed in play, they use more of their brains than when they perform simple analytical tasks. Cognitive scientists have studied the brainwaves of 8-year-olds playing with Legos and discovered as much. We use the open-ended exploration games to find solutions within an organized framework.

WSJ: Why are these games important today?

Mr. Hohmann: Society is changing, and leadership structures are shifting. The command-and-control business structure is fading, and if you look at the next generation, you see a flattening hierarchy. Elements of a person’s personal life carry into professional life…”

Link to Full article

What: Product Camp NYC
Where: Down Town Association, 60 Pine Street, New York City 10005
When: Saturday, July 18, 2009, 8:00 am to 4:30 pm
Cost: Free, more information here
Organized by: New York Product Management Association

ProductCamp is a collaborative, user organized professional conference, focused on Product Management and Marketing topics. At ProductCamp everyone participates in some manner: presenting, leading a discussion, showcasing a best practice, or sharing their experiences. Others help with logistics, securing sponsorships, organizing sessions, or settng up/cleaning up. This is a self organizing collaborative event that is designed be a fun, rewarding and a unique experience.

ProductCamp is a great opportunity for participants to learn from, teach to, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development process from the New York City Metro area – and around the world! [CLICK HERE TO REGISTER]

What: “Agile Comes to You,” a mini-conference with experts from AccuRev, Coverity, Electric Cloud, Enthiosys, and Rally Software.  Hosted by CM Crossroads,
Where: The Westin Bellevue, Bellevue, WA
When:  Tuesday, July 28, 8:30 AM – 3:00 PM
Register here

Shrinking budgets. Competing priorities. Schedule risk. It’s easy in a turbulent time to keep your head down, focus on putting out one fire at a time, and hope things get better. But this is actually a great time to look at how Agile software development techniques and the tools that support them can help you reduce risk, boost the productivity of your existing organization, and cut development costs. Not enough time or budget to travel to industry events this year? This unique conference will bring Agile thought leaders and solutions to you.

Following a keynote from Rich Mironov, Enthiosys CMO and Agile expert, on ‘Mitigating Risk with Agile Development’, you’ll hear expert presentations on Agile topics such as:

• An agile approach to requirements management
• Proving the ROI impact of Agile methods and tools
• Keys to effective, reliable continuous integration
• Emerging SCM best practices for Agile development
• How to ensure software quality/security throughout Agile development cycles

A product showcase will also feature live demonstrations of Agile project management, build and release, change management and test solutions that are helping to improve the effectiveness of development projects and teams.

Register today for our complimentary conference and multi-vendor product showcase.

What: Agile 2009: Making Agile Real
When: August 24-28, 2009
Where: the Hyatt Regency Chicago
Register here!

The entire Enthiosys team will be joining in the fun, including three sessions with Luke Hohmann centered around Innovation Games, and a talk by Rich Mironov about agile product managers/product owners, who chaired the conference’s APM/PO track.

Agile 2009 will be an exciting international conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and first-hand experience, from both the management and technical sides of agile software development. The agile approach focuses on delivering business value early in the project lifetime and being able to incorporate emergent requirements. It accentuates the use of rich, informal communication channels and frequent delivery of running, tested systems, while attending to the human component of software development.

Agile 2009 gives attendees access to the latest thinking in this domain, and bridges communities that rarely get a chance to exchange ideas and thoughts. It brings together researchers from labs and academia with executives, managers, and developers in the trenches of software development. The conference is not about a single methodology or approach, but rather provides a forum for the exchange of information regarding all agile development technologies.

1. Agile development doesn’t solve market problems. The biggest drivers of product success are external: choosing segments, identifying important customer needs, executing the sales process well, and pricing for value. No matter how fast (and how well) Engineering does its thing, whole products are a blend of pricing, marketing, segmentation, sales channels, messaging, positioning, packaging, and technology. We’ve all seen companies with mediocre software outsell technically superior competitors. Don’t be hypnotized into believing that Engineering will ever replace Marketing, Sales or Product Management. (FYI, a public example of this is the original market research we conducted with Borland in February of this year.)

2. We need fewer strategic priorities. More than ever, current economic environment demands that executives make a few strategic choices, fully fund projects against them, and have a roadmap that honestly sequences the work. Fortunately, this is exactly what Agile methods require for success. Our old approach of “peanut-buttering” insufficient investments across dozens of “priority-one” initiatives, with everyone working on three or more projects, gets exposed under agile as grossly inefficient. (Check your burn-down.)  The entire executive team needs to agree on the top two priorities, admit that everything else is #3 or lower, and then hold product management accountable to creating and managing their priorities – and development to demonstrating actual progress.

3. Improvement won’t be instantaneous. When Engineering and Product Management start along the road to agile, give them at least a quarter to regain their original waterfall productivity and two or three more to really rock. Big organizations will probably need 18+ months to roll out serious change. Don’t hover after 3 weeks and start micromanaging velocity.  (Our colleague Jeff Sutherland reports that extremely disciplined use of Agile methods can produce results more quickly.  But as corporate executives, we want to manage our own expectations.)

4. The bottleneck is moving elsewhere. As Development catches up with its backlog – shipping twice as much software with higher quality – other parts of the company are being stressed. Channel Marketing has to brief resellers twice as often, Marcom must revise collateral every quarter, Support needs training on the latest update, Operations has new bundles to create and price lists to change. Finally, Sales has to deliver real revenue against the improvements it demanded. (“I know I told Engineering that we could close $16M if we added Finnish and Swedish versions…”)

5. We need much better and much faster market input. Marketing used to field one annual customer satisfaction survey and take suggestions at the annual User Group. Now, dozens of product owners are raising product issues in real time. Product teams need to get rapid qualitative market inputs aligned with two-to-four week cycles and continue to do long-term market research. This means thinking about market research differently. And once we have dozens (hundreds) of agile teams, Portfolio Management needs to make sure we have a coordinated way to collaborate with busy customers about large as well as small issues.

6. Maybe my department should be agile? Lately, I’m getting asked about applying agile (or lean or scrum) to Marketing or Finance. This feels backwards, though: applying a method without thinking through the need. Scrum may be a good approach if your Marketing team is having trouble tracking deliverables and effort… but begs the question of how to track Marketing results rather than just activity. It may be challenging to apply “done done” completion criteria to everything in Product Management (or Marketing or Finance or Operations) since some results take a long time to prove out.

FYI, I’ve heard that Serena’s Marketing groups runs itself using scrum, and Open View Partners is running an entire VC firm via scrum, so there are some real-life examples. There are also strong parallels to the Gazelle framework and Agile methods. Love to hear about your situation below or in the twittersphere.

Sound Byte

An agile software development team creates challenges as well as opportunities for the rest of the company. To gain the benefit of the opportunities while minimizing the challenges, think holistically about markets and customers and focus on the Agile business.

No matter how agile Development is, you’ll never build a successful product if the work being done isn’t aligned to the company strategy and market needs.

A PDF version is also available on Pragmatic Marketing’s site.

What: Innovation Games talk and workshop, part of the SG ‘09 Conference and Expo
When: Sept 29th (keynote) and Sept 30th (workshop)
Where: Cintermex Convention Center, Monterrey, MX
Conference details and registration (in Spanish)

SG ‘09 Expo is about software development, focused on professional IT leaders in Mexico and Latin America. The goal is to reach the local professionals and get them in contact with the new trends and best practices from around the globe. It happens in Monterrey, presented by the Software Council of Nuevo Leon.  Going to the SG’09 will make you a better software developer; not only will you find new technologies and tools, but you will also learn about how real projects work. You will also find new business opportunities and great networking.

Reasons to go to the SG’09

• Learn best practices that contribute to success
• Discover new techniques to lead and manage projects and teams
• Develop your vision about the software industry and the opportunities within it.
• Get to know some other colleagues
• Get to know new tech and tools

How is the event structured?

• 1 day of practical tutorials (Sept 27 )
• 2 days of talks and expos (Sept 28 – 29)
• 1 day for IT leaders (Sept 30)

Summary
Embrace the Education & Diversity is the theme of the conference.

Description
The premier event for licensing education and networking, the LES (USA & Canada) Annual Meeting will take place October 18-22 in San Francisco, CA. Perhaps no other area in the world better represents the synergy of technology, business, and entrepreneurship. The 2009 Annual Meeting will capitalize on this opportunity by focusing on Education and Diversity in licensing. The diversity of ideas presented at the LES (USA & Canada) Annual Meeting is invaluable to anyone in the ever-changing field of licensing. Only at an LES meeting can you gain fresh perspectives by drawing from the diverse industries and specialties that make LES distinctive, from health care and high technology to chemicals, energy and materials technology.

You’ll be tempted to “leave your heart” in San Francisco while staying at the San Francisco Marriott. Ride a historic Cable Car to nearby attractions, including Market Street, Fisherman’s Wharf, Golden Gate Park and Bridge, Union Square

Date: Friday, June 26, 2009
Time: 9 am – 5 pm
Place: Dogpatch Studios, 991 Tennessee Street, San Francisco, CA
Cost: $50 per person.  REGISTER HERE
Capacity: up to 150 individuals with experience sponsoring, designing or facilitating Innovation Games, Design Games, Serious Games or related activities.  Tag your tweets as #idsge

If you are interested in how games solve problems, you are invited to IDSGE. This event is meant for a range of practitioners – from those who have heard provocative things about games or who have experimented a little – through those who use games on a regular basis – to those who design and develop games in the physical and digital worlds.

You don’t have to be an expert to contribute something at IDSGE. Skills you bring may include: interaction design, product management, group facilitation, game design, usability evaluation, play testing, and a sense of fun.

Examples include:

• Innovation Games®: Aimed at getting authentic customer responses to questions about new product concepts, product usage, customer needs and product requirements, this group of a dozen activities help your customers tell you things you didn’t know to ask.
• Design games: Offering collaborative design activities within a game format improves idea generation and communication among stakeholders. By shifting focus to the game, power relations and other factors that might hamper idea generation, are downplayed.
• Serious games: Ranging from theater improvisation to interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors, serious games have uses in education, government, health, military, science, corporate training, first responders, and social change

Sessions are created by participants the day the event happens, so these topics are suggestions but many like them will.

• How to apply an innovation game to product development
• What kinds of games work well in what situations
• Massive multi-player social games
• Agile software development and selecting the right game for enterprise customers

Bring a case study – something that worked as planned or something that took an unexpected turn – to share and discuss. Even if you only have one example of a game you did once, it’s worth it to share.

Learn what people are tweeting about ISDGE here!

If you want to learn more about unconferences, including how to prepare for an unconference look at http://www.unconference.net/ including the .pdf document referenced there.

SPONSORS AND SPONSOR PACKAGES

Corporate Sponsors:

Personal Sponsors:

This is a community-driven event: Half the costs are covered by participant registration fees, the other half by sponsors.

Organizers:

• Luke Hohmann, CEO, Enthiosys, Mountain View CA, author of Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, lhohmann@enthiosys.com
• Nancy Frishberg, User Experience Strategist, MSB Associates, San Mateo CA, nancyf@fishbird.com, and Innovation Games Facilitator
• Kaliya Hamlin (aka Identity Woman), Process Geeks, Berkeley, CA, kaliya@mac.com, and Innovation Games Facilitator

The aim of the CIPO Manifesto Working Group is to become recognized as one of the leading authorities on the CIPO role, with its members firmly at the cutting edge of discussions shaping a position that is likely to become pivotal in many industries over the coming years.

The prominent CIPOs taking part in the meeting are: Marshall Phelps, Microsoft; Damon Matteo, PARC; Sherry Knowles, GlaxoSmithKline; Carl Horton, GE; Ruud Peters, Philips IP & Standards; Peter Cicala, Shire Pharmaceuticals; Bill Elkington, Rockwell Collins; Beatrix de Russé, Thomson; Wayne Sobon, Accenture; Erin-Michael Gill, OQO Inc;and Scott Frank, AT&T. Others involved are: Todd Dickinson, the executive director of the American Intellectual Property Law Association; Shinjiro Ono, the former deputy commissioner of the Japan Patent Office; John Squires, the former head of IP at Goldman Sachs; James Malackowski, CEO of OceanTomo; Duncan Bucknell, of Duncan Bucknell Company and the author of the IP Thinktank blog; Ulf Petrusson, Director of CIP, Gothenburg; Ian Harvey, chairman of the IP Institute; and Anne Culotta, who is studying while on a leave of absence from Halliburton where she was Director of Patents.

This session will be facilitated by Luke Hohmann, CEO of Enthiosys, who will be using Innovation Games as part of facilitation process.  We’re honored to have Luke named for such a prominent role within the CIPO community.