Using serious games to guide commercial success from the fuzzy front-end

Despite the vast amount of research carried out on new product development (NPD) tools and techniques, studies have shown that there is a huge gap between their academic prevalence and their industry adoption. While many industrialists admit that the tools developed in academia would be beneficial to their NPD efforts, they believe that the tools are simply not worth the effort required to use them. One way to address this issue is by improving the value offered by these tools, and this research aims to achieve this by implementing the innovation game 'Buy a Feature.' Originally created for portfolio prioritization and adapted for software development projects, this 'serious game' encourages end-users to collaboratively buy and bid on potential features of a product with play money. By providing users with a total budget that is insufficient to buy all the features, it forces them to think about which features are most important to them and to discuss their reasoning behind each choice. This provides product development (PD) teams with a better idea of which features to prioritize based on how much customers are likely to spend, and at a very early stage of the process. The researcher believes that by integrating this game with the traditional NPD process, particularly the Kano Model, it can also be useful for teams developing physical products. To test this, a study was carried out with 29 teams of final year NPD students bringing a product from concept through to production specification. It is expected that teams who used the proposed methodology will have a higher confidence in their product's fit-to-market than teams who did not use it. Indeed, the study has already shown that many teams' assumptions about which features customers cared most about were incorrect. It is also evident that the game will have to be modified to include multiple 'tiers' of bidding for features categorised as 'one-dimensional' in the Kano Model, and teams should apply a 'tax' when setting prices for features to cover hidden development costs and approximate estimations made at such an early stage of the process. Overall, results thus far are very promising.