Innovation Dojos: A playground to cultivate innovation skills

Learnings from sketching and testing an innovation dojo as a game.

Recently, I sketched and tested an innovation concept that I thought could be more fun. The concept was the innovation dojo. Like any good sketch and lean test with real people, it provided interesting insights. It validated the importance of creativity and making innovation fun for teams.

Here are some learnings from the experiment for innovation practitioners.

How could we create Innovation Dojos that foster autonomy, purpose, and mastery?

If you search Innovation Dojos you will find that they have been experiments by consulting organisations or moderators. The usual format is multiple sprints, a pitch space or hands-on learning blocks to apply the knowledge gained.

To an innovation practitioner, these formats generate many questions. For example: How can we really make innovation a space for purpose, autonomy, and mastery rather than a linear process for people to go through? How can we make it really “stick”? How can we authentically connect teams with innovation rapidly? Tap into their curiosity? How can we create a space for leaders to reimagine how they go about their everyday opportunity creation while having fun?

If you have innovated with or without a role tag, you know innovation is rooted in a voracious curiosity, the hunger to make things better, deep love for human creative potential, and the courage to face uncertainty & make things happen. With that spirit and using game thinking, I decided to have fun and reimagine the dojo concept. The outcome has been innovation dojo as a game.

What is innovation dojo as a game?

An innovation dojo as a game is a playground for the modularised cultivation of innovation skills. Builds momentum through connection, collaboration, contribution, and reflection. Aims to generate for the participant a journey of purpose, autonomy, and mastery with others. It is also the space where team members with beginner or advanced knowledge of innovation can be exposed to hands-on innovation methodologies, the latest practices, cases, and current thought leaders. It doesn’t expose to one innovation method, but multiple. To conclude, it uses game thinking as a framework as it introduces multiple innovation methods. Core, loops, and features become key concepts responsible for making the experience sticky.

Loyal to its name it offers a “place of the way” where participants own their journey towards mastery.

What does it look like?

Source: Nastasha Velasco.

Different from previous concepts, for the innovation dojos as a game I used the following architecture:

1. A journey. Going towards or racing from. For this concept the journey was racing from losing market share to competitors, business stagnation, having to employ whatever talent there is rather than the best, not meeting customers’ needs and becoming irrelevant.
2. A core. Is the statement of purpose. The one thing the game is about.The hub of a wheel. For this concept, the core is cultivating innovation skills in teams. Simple. No beating around the bush.
3. A loop. If you can imagine a core as the hub of a wheel, the core loop is that wheel in motion. This is what continuously happens to the participants as they interact with the core. And is actually a core spiral because as the participant continuously interacts with it the participant achieves a higher level of mastery. For this concept, my loop was: make a hypothesis, empathise, design what best to do, playtest, connect/reflect, and get rewarded (in this case view growth). This is a fundamental concept. The participant moves fast, at high frequency, and continuously through it. For example, in 20 minutes you might do 3 of these loops with little challenges. As the participant moves through the game, they will have gone through 500 loops and are rewarded with viewing their growth continuously. This isn’t the traditional approach to designing the exposure to innovation. Hence, this is why is so interesting.
4. A module. Is just the theme of the challenge you will face. For example, one of my modules was building an innovation team. The participants had to move from innocence (white belt) to awakening (orange belt) in 20 minutes by completing 3 challenges, facing chance, connecting, giving each other feedback, and then scoring each other. The caveat: honesty in the scoring about each other takes you faster towards being an innovation sensei. Suddenly people stop being too polite!??

Example. Module, alpha sketch

Source: Nastasha Velasco.

1. Features or features set. These are the elements of the game’s design that we want to develop. For example, if the team doubles the customer feedback in the product development challenge, add 15 points.
2. Outcomes and impact. These are not core elements of a game but for innovation are relevant to track in participants. For example, for outcomes, I measure what each participant made/delivered and for impact, their teammates’ score.

Within this architecture, you have characters, degrees of mastery, points, and rules of the game. In this article, we won’t cover the game itself fully. The purpose of this article is to show one key learning: game thinking provides a different framing for cultivating innovation skills in our teams. This simple change in the framing creates new fantastic possibilities to cultivate innovation. The learning of innovation can be made more fun.

Users feedback?

People liked the game and wanted to keep playing. They felt the loop helped them improve or “earn their belts”??. Honesty became more frequent accelerating improvement. Everyone wanted to become a sensei faster. They learned the frameworks by applying and seeing the results in real time. Moreover, they share the interest in having a “zen” character that provides additional clues upon request. Furthermore, the user-friendliness of the journey was a MUST. For this concept test, I used a mural sketch. I could have used directly a Figma design for the test. Finally, the “environment” was relevant ( the music used, the silences, the tone of the voice for the introduction of the challenges, etc).

I will integrate these learnings in the next experiments.

What are some limitations?

Innovation dojos require openness. Team members will be playing and testing. Their focus is on learning the latest and best practices in innovation while doing them. It is not creating a product. Is learning and testing multiple innovation methods so thanks to experimentation team members can go into the real world and further experiment to make their organisation better. Is a “place of the way”.

They also require time. To architect some of the key elements we covered. You can find yourself thinking of trade-offs, and implications a lot.

Key insight?

Innovation dojos as a game are only one example of the potential that decentralised innovation formats could hold for the practice of innovation.

Interested in the concept approach?

Feel free to connect or reach out! I will be happy to explore with you the game. I am exploring and experimenting with the concept. Moreover, we have some open community sessions with this game concept at Growth Vikings. Feel free to join!

Do you have feedback?

Feel free to reach out and share. I always love a good catch-up around innovation with innovators!?

Hasta pronto,

Nastasha Velasco