Understanding Innovation Games and Exploring Problems
Innovation is rarely a straight-line process. When teams rely on familiar meetings and brainstorming methods, they can easily fall back on established assumptions and ways of thinking. Innovation games provide a structured way to approach problems differently. By combining play, visualisation, and guided interaction, they help teams explore challenges, understand users, and uncover insights that can support better innovation decisions.
In this first part of the series, we’ll explore what innovation games are, their benefits, and two practical techniques: Speed Boat and Empathy Mapping.
Understanding Innovation Games
Innovation games are structured activities that help teams collaborate, think creatively, and solve complex problems. Unlike traditional brainstorming, these activities use frameworks such as visualisation, metaphors, constraints, and different perspectives to help participants approach challenges in new ways.
Innovation games are closely connected to Design Thinking and Human-Centred Innovation, particularly during the problem framing and ideation stages.
Why Use Innovation Games?
Complex challenges often involve different assumptions, priorities, and perspectives. Innovation games give teams a shared process for exploring these differences.
They can help teams:
Surface assumptions and hidden challenges
Encourage participation across teams and roles
Explore problems from different perspectives
Build a shared understanding of complex issues
Generate and organise ideas
Move discussions toward actionable insights
The structure also helps create psychological safety, giving participants a defined way to contribute rather than allowing discussions to be dominated by the most vocal members.
The goal is not simply to make workshops more engaging. It is to create a different environment for thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving.
Benefits of Play-Based Innovation Activities
Play-based innovation does not mean making the innovation process less rigorous. Instead, structured activities can help teams challenge assumptions and explore possibilities in ways that conventional discussions may not.
Key benefits include:
Reduce Cognitive Bias
Innovation games can help teams step outside familiar thinking patterns and challenge limitations such as confirmation bias and functional fixedness.
Improve Collaboration
Shared activities can reduce silos and encourage more balanced participation across different teams and levels of seniority.
Generate Better Ideas
Changing how a problem is presented can encourage teams to explore more varied and original possibilities.
Increase Engagement
Interactive activities create a more dynamic working environment, helping participants maintain focus and contribute actively.
Build Innovation Capability
Repeated use of innovation games helps organisations develop a common language and repeatable approach to innovation.
Accelerate Exploration
Visual and experiential activities allow teams to explore assumptions and potential solutions before committing significant time and resources. When integrated into an Innovation Action Plan, these activities become part of a broader process for moving from insight to implementation.
Speed Boat: Identify Barriers and Pain Points
Speed Boat is an innovation game used to identify the barriers, pain points, and challenges preventing a product, service, process, or organisation from moving forward. It is particularly useful early in the innovation process when teams need to understand what is not working and what is slowing progress down.
How Speed Boat Works
The exercise uses a simple nautical metaphor:
Boat: The product, service, or organisation
Destination: The goal the team wants to achieve
Anchors: Problems or obstacles slowing progress
Wind: Factors helping the team move forward
A typical exercise involves:
Draw a boat and define its destination.
Ask participants to identify challenges and pain points.
Write each issue on a separate note and place it as an anchor.
Add wind elements to represent positive factors, if relevant.
Discuss which anchors have the greatest impact.
Prioritise the barriers that should be addressed.
Explore ways to remove or reduce them.
The visual metaphor makes problems easier to see and discuss as a group.
Facilitation Tip
Begin with individual reflection before group discussion. This gives participants time to identify challenges independently and helps prevent the conversation from being shaped by only the most vocal contributors.
Speed Boat helps teams answer: “What is slowing us down?”
Empathy Mapping: Understand User Needs
Identifying organisational problems is only part of innovation. Teams also need to understand the people experiencing those problems.
Empathy Mapping is a collaborative Design Thinking technique that helps teams organise observations about a user or customer across four areas:
Says → Thinks → Does → Feels
How Empathy Mapping Works
Place a specific user or persona at the centre of the map, then populate each section using information from research and observation.
Says: What has the user explicitly said? Capture quotes, concerns, and key statements.
Thinks: What might the user be thinking but not expressing directly? Consider motivations, expectations, and uncertainties.
Does: What behaviours and actions can be observed?
Feels: What emotions does the user experience throughout the journey?
Once the map is populated, look for patterns, contradictions, pain points, and unmet needs. These can then be translated into opportunity areas for further investigation.
Keep Research at the Centre
An empathy map should not become a collection of assumptions. Where possible, base observations on actual user research. If assumptions are necessary, identify them clearly so they can be validated later. The goal is to move from “what we think users need” toward a stronger understanding of what users actually experience.
Empathy Mapping helps teams answer: “What is the user experiencing?”
Connecting Speed Boat and Empathy Mapping
These two innovation games work well together because they examine a challenge from different perspectives. Speed Boat identifies what is preventing progress, while Empathy Mapping explores how those problems affect users.
For example, a team might identify a slow customer service process as an anchor during a Speed Boat exercise. Empathy Mapping can then reveal what that process feels like for customers such as frustration, uncertainty, or the need to repeat information.
This combination connects organisational challenges with human needs, creating a stronger foundation for problem framing and ideation.
Conclusion
Innovation games give teams practical ways to explore complex challenges without relying solely on conventional brainstorming. Speed Boat helps identify barriers and pain points, while Empathy Mapping develops a deeper understanding of users. Together, they establish an important foundation for Human-Centred Innovation:
Understand the problem. Understand the people. Then decide what to solve.
What’s Next?
In the next blog, we’ll move from exploring problems to developing and prioritising solutions using Cover Story, The 5 Whys, and the Impact-Effort Matrix.
Last Words
I will be adding more articles on Design Thinking, Strategy and Innovation throughout the year. Articles of these 5 Step Action Plan and Modern Soft Skills will be added periodically to give my readers a broader insights to how to crush complex problems, overcome future challenges and spot AI opportunities.
Check out more articles via my blog: https://www.emerge-creatives.com/blog-1
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About the Author
Daniel Ling is a regional ex-Design Leader turned educator, and business owner of Emerge Creatives, an registered SSG training provider (RTP) to deliver modern soft skills to professionals through Design Thinking, Business Strategy, and AI Innovation.
With over 15 years of experience in the financial and e-commerce tech industries- including key leadership roles at Lazada, NTUC Income, OCBC, and DBS- Daniel has led cross-regional design teams, built design functions from the ground up, and spearheaded large-scale transformation initiatives. But beyond industry success,
Daniel has reinvented himself as a “designer in a business suit”- equally fluent in creative strategy and commercial impact.
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