Within qualitative marketing research, an innovation game is a form of primary market research developed by Luke Hohmann where customers play a set of directed games as a means of generating feedback about a product or service.
“Customers” who play innovation games are commonly direct recipients or consumers of a specific product or service.
In some cases, though, game players may be any person or system who is or would be affected by a product or service.
Innovation games are directed by a facilitator whose responsibilities include: The successful operation of an innovation game relies on collaborative play among the participants and a set of observers drawn from disparate functional groups within an organization.
Arguably, the most important observer is the product manager because that person is responsible for acting on the data generated by the game.