Innovating can range from dreamy ideating to a process of market-research based needs fulfillment. We were faced with these two stark choices, each with its own limitation, during the process of designing the ClikServ system.

Dreaming up ideas to serve a market assumes a keen understanding of the markplace ecosystem. That is not easy. One needs an initial understanding, deep contacts and lots of digging. Researching a market that is large and varied is itself very daunting. What is the right persona to base it upon? Who can provide the right feedback? How do we validate the feedback? Is our customer the publisher or the reader?

At ClikServ, we rejected the first approach and postponed the latter in favor of a relatively new idea. First we identified that our success can only arise from adoption by readers. If the readers like it, the publishers will follow. So went our thinking.

While looking for a method of defining features and ideas to serve content readers, I came across Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games methodology and book.

Innovation Games methodology allowed us to engage with readers (customers) in a fun way. We played “Prune the Tree” game with a group of 35 readers. We took liberties with the prescribed game and changed it to “Build the Tree” where

1. Roots were the ClikServ infrastructure required
2. Trunk was the ClikServ platform
3. Major branches were the offering features, and
4. Minor branches were the future of ClikServ offering

ClikServ Tree Doodle

The results of the game were amazing. Folks were given 20 minutes to play, but the game went on for more than an hour with strong participation. Many wondeful ideas came up, many of which we were able to include in our future roadmap. More on that in a later post.

The biggest lessons learnt were

1. Staff your Innovation Game fully. Learning from the game is seriously hampered without at least 4 individuals, including 1 presenter, 2 observers, 1-2 bad wedding photographer.
2. Make sufficient time for the game. The game takes an energy of its own and should not be curtailed artificially. Neither should one provide too much time that folks start leaving.
3. Allocate sufficient time before the game for prep, and after the game for a very detailed review.

Please contact us if you feel you can benefit from content monetization, or would like to help us help publishers and readers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Micropayments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.