🪴 Quartz 4.0

Innovation Game Proposal

Nov 05, 201812 min read

TODO This page is too long and will be split. #Management Games

  • Imagine a business administration class

    • How to innovate is not something you learn in a classroom.
    • Need hands-on experience on your own
    • But the learning cycle is too big to actually do the project.
      • There is also the difficulty of aligning assumptions about technical capabilities.
      • Can’t we experience this in game?

  • Isn’t it important to experience failure?

Market Exploration Game Proposal

  • Goods have multiple attributes (goods are represented by a vector of real values)

  • How much the market values the product (market utility) is represented by a function, but that function is unknown to the player

  • By putting a good on the market, we know the utility of the good (we know the value of the utility function at that point).

  • If you put a product on the market and know how well it works, that information is shared with your opponents.

  • You can do test marketing without bringing a product to market, but unknown noise and bias will take over.

  • There are limitations on “products that can be made” due to technical constraints, etc.

    • Restrictions can be lifted by event cards (technological innovation), or conversely, restrictions can be created (legal regulation).

  • The company’s investment in technological development can create a situation where “only the company is a little less constrained”, but this becomes obsolete after a few turns once the product is released

  • The higher the utility of a product on the market, the higher the sales? There is room for ingenuity here.

    • There should be room for a strategy of small market share but high profit margin products, but I wonder if that will be done with expansion packs.
    • The cost of producing a product should vary from company to company.
    • Manufacturing costs are lowered by manufacturing repeatedly or in large batches.
    • Pricing is one of the “attributes of a product,” and basically the cheaper the better the utility.

  • There are several possible seating arrangements and winning conditions.

    • Starting with everyone having the same resources, the person who made the most money after a certain amount of time wins.
    • Competition between one “monopolistic big company” and the remaining members of an “innovative venture”.
      • Needs a little handicap on the part of large companies.
        • Express slow decision-making with “dice roll and turn skip” or “take a break every three times.”
        • Only the venture side can draw the “venture capital” card, and so on.
        • Pulling talent from large companies
      • Whether the venture team will play cooperatively
        • If we can break the monopoly of a large corporation, the venture team all wins.”
        • There’s also the “venture team is only valuable if each of us survives without going bankrupt.”
          • This one is more realistic, but boring when you drop out mid-game and have nothing to do.
          • Those who drop out can be hired by the person with the highest price among those remaining, increasing the number of possible actions per turn.

  • Strategic Considerations

    • Large corporate players with sufficient resources can start a cycle of “alleviating constraints on their own R&D,” “securing market share and profits by producing products with high utility that other companies cannot produce,” and “reinvesting the profits back into R&D. This is what is called “closed innovation.
    • In situations where the utility function is not well understood or resources are scarce, it is important to play the “get information at the lowest possible cost” game, the so-called Lean Startup. On the other hand, under these game conditions, there are no barriers to entry, so it is effective for a large company to carpet bomb around a good product that the venture has found and take market share.

  • subspecies

    • A proposal to hire N people by paying a cost of N each turn, which would increase the number of actionable points by log(N) each turn.
      • However, dismissal is difficult
    • Forced to make a business decision on whether to patent the content of R&D or keep it confidential within the company.
      • A patent gives you legal protection for a few turns, but it is obvious what you have patented and your competitors can attack the perimeter.
      • If you don’t patent, you leak to the competition if your employees are not loyal.

  • mounting

    • I’d like to leave the “unknown utility function” and “share calculation” to computers.
    • I hope there will be a single player scenario mode in addition to the multiplayer mode.
      • Important to experience that there is no “one best strategy” and that it varies from situation to situation
    • There should be a system that allows for the creation of various variants
    • The multiplayer mode is just a hot seat mode, considering it’s done in a workshop.
    • Wouldn’t it be nice if it worked in JS on the browser?
    • Tutorial Plan
      • Share 50:50 to start, we have industrial espionage here, and the computer side of the test marketing is going down the tubes.
    • Games start with minimal functionality and gradually get more complex as you get used to it.

  • It is not good if it becomes a game of positioning in a fixed space.

    • More axes need to be added, and it would be good if different players notice the increased axes differently.

  • How to express that demand is created

    • complementary good
    • Creating a strong brand through advertising: the brand itself becomes a new axis of attributes
      • Attributing this axis is a trademarked monopoly.
      • Success in creating a new axis is luck; are there parameters that contribute, such as “a significant difference from the competition” or “nothing similar has been done in the past”?
    • Is demand really being created in the first place?

  • event card

    • I originally intended to make all unpredictable changes into event cards, but they are inappropriate in two ways
    • External changes in the environment that occur over time should be separated from the type of changes (R&D, advertising, etc.) that have unpredictable results but can be tried more often.
    • Also, in the card metaphor, the player can know that “change has occurred,” but in reality, that’s not always the case.

  • motif

    • Would you like to see new technologies created through unforeseen new combinations?
    • Dragger’s “Seven Opportunities for Innovation.”
      • 5991a444aff09e0000b517da
      • Chasing “unexpected success” is the easiest way to succeed.
        • The presence of customers should not be directly observable, but observed by putting out products
    • How to make an idea Averaging makes a bad idea.
    • Use outside resources to solve problems
      • Skills in abstracting and resolving outside confidential information outside of the company.
      • open innovation

  • Games in which unpredictable environmental changes occur.

    • The “event card” is bound in a bag and you don’t know what it is until you open it.
    • Games with changing rules

  • semidigitalization

    • I want to leave the messy parts to the machine and let it spin at high speed.
    • Don’t waste time handing out money or exchanging money.
    • Can sample from probability distributions that would be difficult to achieve with dice.
      • Maybe we should bring the “customer presence test” over to the digital side.

  • I mean, what is better to be non-digital in the first place?

  • I don’t have any experience, so I don’t have a clear idea, but maybe a TRPG-type game would be good.

  • creations

    • Creativity (especially the ability to see) can be developed.
    • A two-sided market: those who make and those who guess?
    • plan
      • Create something that meets market needs by combining what you have on hand (make a chair).
      • Resolve in the prediction market whether it is in line with the subject

  • Factorio

  • SimCity

  • Black company and big business disease

    • If the constituent members are satisfied, they are not black, citizens, happiness is a duty.
    • Blackness in a small black company is not the same as blackness in a large company.
      • It’s Premium Friday, so I have to go home, but my work hasn’t decreased, so I have to do service overtime!
    • The institute’s results are tied to the individual, so strikes don’t make sense.
    • Collective bargaining rights are impacted against management because the group strikes.
      • It cannot be established if the productivity of each worker is 100 times different.
      • The type that performs a fixed job and the type that creates the job itself.
      • Drucker’s knowledge worker concept

  • Types of Innovation

    • Walkman is an innovation of ideas “You don’t have to record anything.”
    • Level of technology in the world
    • Alan Kay’s Dynabook didn’t match the idea and the level of technology.
      • Newton also
    • Products feasible at the technical level of the time
      • Technological advances change the constraints of “feasible products”.
    • Would you call creating the technology itself an innovation?
      • Are transistors an innovation?
    • Made radios that sounded worse than vacuum tubes → sold surprisingly well, in fact, the market welcomed the small size.

  • Optimization game and Exploration game

    • Dominion’s optimal strategy depends on how the first 10 cards are chosen.

  • I hate feeling like a failure without knowing it.

    • Why did it fail?

    • go

  • Blue Ocean

    • Assuming that all positioning has been done in advance and everything is scorched earth, let’s find out where it is not scorched earth yet by creating a new axis.

    • But they might not have any clients.

    • Lean to quickly verify if there are customers while releasing the product.

    • Lean has no decision making and prototyping, so we could sprint (Lean is too costly, let’s do it in a week)

    • Niche Contingent Expansion Strategy

    • A strategy of taking a niche top and waiting for it to hit by accident

  • MTG Draft

    • If you try to get the same color as your opponent, you’re competing for resources.
    • Take what they are more likely to throw away.
    • But important cards can be held up because you don’t want to pass them on to your opponent.
    • Positioning Games
    • Same as worker placement

  • The idea that everyone is forced to play the same game is ridiculous to begin with.

    • If you’re in the Warring States period, you’re in the security game.
    • The Cold War was also a Great Game
    • War Games Rome → Pope
    • Modern games have diversified in their evaluation axes, so the game is not alone.

  • Asymmetric Games

    • Labor and Management
    • It would be interesting to see the composition of those two companies fighting a zero-sum game while the two companies fight a plus-sum game as a team.
    • But this game setup may be assuming high reemployment costs, and those with low reemployment costs will not be in one piece with the company.
    • A Tale of Two Towns
      • Cultivate the cities on your left and right, and the lower the score, the more points you get.
      • While it is a cooperative game with the person next to you, you have to balance the distribution of resources because you can’t raise only one of them.

  • Domestic and International Markets

    • How about adding the elements of “domestic and foreign markets” so that people can experience both a situation where the domestic market is expanding rapidly due to population growth and a situation where the domestic market is shrinking rapidly due to population decline?

    • In a situation where the market is expanding, the already observed demand will increase more in the coming year. This is where expanded reproduction and process efficiency become more useful than exploration. In the opposite case, the known demand will shrink further next year, so the company cannot even maintain its size without constantly finding new demand. Trade-offs between use and exploration

    • Can we also run a time machine business that mimics what is successful in foreign markets?

    • worker placement is a management simulation because it is the optimal allocation of human resources.

  • Existing games to learn things system.

  • Care must be taken to avoid being tied to shady businesses.

  • discussion

    • tokoroten: I think the challenge to create a board game of innovation is the most educational.
    • nishio: I agree it’s educational, but it’s “actually trying out the project” and doesn’t solve the “too long learning cycle” problem.
    • tokoroten: do we need to turn the learning cycle around? cf. Cheating Encouragement.

  • tokoroten: I think it would be more interesting to play a game of management vs. employees.

    • shiumachi It looks like it will be difficult to set a winning goal and to balance the game.
      • Make it a cooperative game, with the players on the management team and the workers on the system side.
      • Put the players on the worker side and management on the system side.
      • The instructor is acting as the game master in the training, so asymmetric games could be created.

  • Management (5-year rotation)” stifles innovation and capital investment all over the place.

    • To reap the benefits of my tenure
      • Due cookie clicker.
      • Experienced a curtailment of reinvestment at the deadline

  • However, even if they understand this, there is nothing they can do about it. Let’s make a game in which the lowly man in a big company can increase his market value through self-branding, change jobs, and extract favorable conditions from the company (practical!).

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