We made the game simple to play so that it could be used as an ice-breaker or an exercise in workshops.
Groups of four to six players take on the role of innovation policymakers, aiming to understand which policy proposals are popular across five stakeholder groups: academia, technology, industry, entrepreneurship and community.
Players need to work together to uncover evidence for their policy ideas, use their budget efficiently, share networks, launch surveys and organise round tables. Event cards represent disrupting events, such as economic booms or recessions for example, which force players to adapt their strategy or rationalise their resources regularly throughout the game.
Disrupting event cards
We had the following three objectives in mind when designing the game, driven by the core challenges of innovation policy.
- Get players to understand the need for collaboration and the challenges for communicating effectively when working in silos.
- Demystify failure, encouraging players to experiment with different strategies and learn from their mistakes in the process.
- Highlight the necessity to bring in perspectives of different stakeholders to understand the needs of the beneficiaries of policies they are putting in place.
