Play it forward: A Game-based tool for Sustainable Product and Business Model Innovation in the Fuzzy Front End

Play it forward: A Game-based tool for Sustainable Product and Business Model Innovation in the Fuzzy Front End

Dewulf, K.R.

Industrial Design Engineering

2010-10-27

Dealing with sustainability in the fuzzy front end of innovation is complex and often hard. There are a number of tools available to guide designers, engineers and managers in the design process after the specifications of the product or service are already set, but methods supporting goal finding for sustainable innovations are rare (Hassi et al., 2009) The business game ‘Play it forward’ (Jansen et al., 2010), is a tool for understanding and implementing sustainability in the early stages of an innovation process. The players have to deal with People, Planet, Profit issues on product and business model level, and with the ‘big picture’ forces of change, represented as a set of STEEP (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political) (Fleisher and Bensoussan, 2003) innovation cards. A market-driven team is challenging a technology-driven team. Which team can come up with the most profitable and sustainable business model and convince all the stakeholders in the end? The ‘Play it Forward’ board game is a co-creation of the research group ‘Design for Sustainability’ at Howest and three industrial partners: Pantopicon, Beco and Smidesign. The scope and theory behind the different levels of the ‘Play it Forward’ game are described in this paper together with the experiences and gained insights in several business case studies.

sustainable product innovation
business model innovation
Fuzzy Front End
game-based learning

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:eb7556af-8f93-4a3a-826b-e8ed6de72aa1

9789051550658

Knowledge Collaboration & Learning for Sustainable Innovation: ERSCP-EMSU Conference, 25-29 October 2010, Delft, The Netherlands

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2010 Dewulf, K.R.