Playful Collaboration (or Not): Using a Game to Grasp the Social Dynamics of Open Innovation in Innovation and Business Education

Abstract

This article explores how playing games can be used to teach intangible social interaction across boundaries, in particular within open collaborative innovation. We present an exploratory case study of how students learned from playing a board game in a graduate course of the international and interdisciplinary Innovation and Business master's program in Denmark. We identify several important themes related to the process of learning through playing and the social dynamics of open collaborative innovation, while we also highlight possible caveats of “playing” and practicing open innovation. Our findings imply several opportunities and challenges within education and beyond.

Keywords:

• Co-creation
• Co-opetition
• Games
• Learning
• Play
• Social capital

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Jared Donovan for his help in improving this article, our students for their engagement and constructive attitude in this experience, and Smaranda Calin and Katerina Todorova for their help with data collection. We are, moreover, grateful to the Editor Raj Aggarwal, the Assistant Editor John Goodell, and three anonymous reviewers for excellent comments, which helped us to improve this article.

Notes

¹For the purpose of this article, we will refer to concepts such as “open innovation” and “open collaborative innovation” interchangeably to some extent given their overlap as well as the generally related notions that underlie them (in particular the boundary-crossing innovation activities). Note that this also relates to our unit of analysis, which is not the organization—as common in open innovation research—but rather the (social interaction between) individuals and groups.

²We note that our approach to playing games differs significantly from the formal apporach to game theory, as we will further explain in the discussion of our results.