Innovation is one of those strange business anomalies that exist in our world.  Why anomaly you say?  Innovation is one the things that most organisations and industries say that they want, yet when it comes down to it, it is also something they are most afraid of.  The paradox is created by the sincere desire to create something new, existing in tension with the cultural inertia that resists change. Resisting change often is a sign of being terrified of the possibility of failure.

Business simulations, based on a computer-gaming framework, targeted at innovation, are an idea vehicle to assist organisations who find themselves paralysed by this Innovation vs. Failure tension.

In computer gaming, failure is not the final death-knell of the process that the player is involved in.  Failure is rather a crucial part of the process toward ultimately winning and getting to the final goal.  When a player plays a computer game they inevitably die or make a mistake that leads to a catastrophic failure.  But, the game is designed to allow the player to re-engage at a particular point in the game that they had shrewdly saved, rather than the player having to go all the way back to the beginning of the game and start over.  Consequently, at each point of challenge in the game the player uses a trial and error approach to ultimately succeed.

The organisational paralysis around the potential failure associated with innovation is rooted in a view of failure that is final, rather than one that sees it as part of the process toward success.

As computer game-based business simulations start to enter the corporate work space an opportunity is being created to review the traditional organisational perspective of failure, and to do it within an environment that is specifically designed to accommodate failure as part of its process.

Innovation doesn’t happen in a process void; rather, most research around innovation has identified a broad process that facilitates innovation.

This process can be built into a simulation that looks and feels like a computer game – consequently making the process fun, and more attractive to younger people who have a greater probability of coming up with new ideas, than those who have been around for ages will not think about.  Social networking tools can be built into the simulation environment to encourage collaboration and sharing – a key ingredient in innovation. This results in the creation of a fun, collaborative, failure-tolerant, innovation-process orientated environment.

Ideas that are spawned and worked through in this environment can have additional simulation elements built to test their viability in the virtual world, using logic that is based on historical real-world responses.  Based on the virtual success, or failure, of these innovations the organisation can migrate the innovation into its real-world processes with actions that take the virtual lessons into account.

Computer game-based Innovation simulations aren’t going to resolve the tension between Innovation and Failure, but they do fit comfortably in the space created by this tension.

Guest Post by Raymond de Villiers of Wisdom Games.