4 stars (Readable User-Friendly Book on Innovation) - I am enjoying this book. I like the title "Serious Play", but I dislike the sub-title "How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate". Companies don't innovate people do is my thought. I think the author could have taken this concept one step further. That is tie in the concepts of how innovation relates to chaos theory and fractals and larger concepts. The author's ideas are not that new to me because I am a project manager in a software engineering environment where prototyping and iterations is the name of the game. We have at most 3 months to make a difference, to deliver and then we are swept into the ocean of change. You have a small window of opportunity before both the game and the players change. I think that the world may be on the verge of moving so fast that we begin to see things like the wiki, open source culture in that it takes all of us innovating collectively in serious play. Long term I wonder if you are not free, workable and now, you are not in the game. Some concepts for me are: 1) Importance of being able to improvise in the moment 2) Prototyping both reveals the underlying power cutural structures and changes them. 3) Human beings are relationship morphing entities. 4) the importance of shared collaboration space that invite clever interactions between people. 5) Treating prototypes as conversation pieces 6) Watch for the underlying feeling of geniune fun 7) The importance of the challenge or obstacles to the game 8) We shape our models, our models shape us 9) "In order to have actionable meaning, the fuzzy mental models ... must be externalized in representations in ways... that can be grasped" 10) Prototypes force individuals to confront the tyranny of tradeoffs (i.e. difficult decisions) 11) "All models are attempt to manage the complexity by making it simpler and more accessible" While the text is very readable I had trouble pulling out the underlying structure of the b... Harvard Business School Press :: Technology :: Technological Innovations :: Strategic Planning :: Simulation methods :: Nanotechnology :: Models and model making :: Management :: Decision Making & :: Serious Play- How the World-s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate
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