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Submitted for the 12th Internation Conference on Culture and Creativity, on November 17-18, 2017, in Kaunas, Lithuania.

A Cognitive Framework for Innovation Based on Gamestorming

Purpose. We analyze a map of the innovation process which we draw by considering the purposes of the various improvisational group activities (games) for managing innovation in organizations.

Methodology. Gamestorming is a toolkit of about 100 innovation games which have been collected, described, created and/or used by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo and their colleagues. Each game addresses a particular purpose in the creative work of organizations and so identifies a distinct step in the innovation process. We group the games according to related purposes and then structure the various purposes to create a map. We analyze the map as a cognitive framework for innovation and compare it with existing models.

Results. The purposes of the games define the innovation process as a sequence of steps: Consent, Care, Understand, Transform, Innovate, Validate and Commit. These steps have participants step out from their situation, discover a new perspective, and then step back into their situation. Some of the games have the participants align their efforts explicitly, and others, implicitly. The climax of innovation is given by Transformation, where an idea may be distilled (summing up what is remarkable, communicating passionately with simple images, focusing on feasability and viability, describing problems so that we care) or a perspective may be inverted (unfolding knowledge from one's audience's point of view, shifting focus from process to recurring value, opening up to opportunities, or translating features into benefits).

The theoretical contribution. The resulting cognitive framework allows innovation games such as those used in Gamestorming to be used as data for studying group cognition, in general, and group innovation, in particular.

Practical implications (if applicable). The cognitive framework may then be applied to consider which part of the innovation process one is dealing with and which game might be helpful to achieve the relevant objectives.

Keywords: Innovation, facilitation, cognitive framework, games.