Innovation Game: Stimulating the Emergence of Combinatorial Thinking

Abstract

We developed a card game, where players combine ideas written on the cards they buy and sell. The created combinations lead to new values in the future of technologies in human society, and the players, virtually playing the role of innovative founders of companies of year 2030, compete their obtained income after the commercial interactions with other players. The game of 2 hours went to be more and more enthusiastic with the passing of time, while we recorded the contents of their communications. As a result, we are finding that (1) the enthusiasm grows with time, and this enthusiasm saturates in the latter period of the game keeping the high level (2) their thought leads to the evolution of the game rule, which realized a similar environment to the real innovation process with the activated stock market.