Frequently Asked Questions

The Start-Up Game™ is a dynamic, hands-on board game designed to involve business teams in tackling real business challenges through structured play. It guides participants on a learning journey that introduces them to innovation concepts, principles, techniques, and the language of innovation within the context of a socially responsible start-up.

The Start-Up Game™ core game kit includes a boxed set of game materials, including a large colourful printed game board mat, four sets of dice and tokens, five sets of game cards, a playbook, and a player's notes and scorepad.

There is an interactive website for members to log in to, which features a series of learning videos and downloadable resources. It also offers a set of downloadable pre- and post-game communication templates for game organisers, including innovation hints and links to learning videos.

Game facilitators, trainers, and coaches can also access the digital presenters pack, playbooks, game card sets, game run sheet, train-the-trainer videos, and team problem templates. Game partners can also access comprehensive source documents of the start-up game to customise it further, meeting the individual learning needs of specific clients.

Mindsets play a crucial role in innovation because they shape how people connect with themselves, think, feel, make choices and decisions, solve problems, and achieve their purpose and strategic goals. They influence the behaviours and actions you take, the results you attain, and how you can adapt, innovate, grow, and remain sustainable through disruption. All teams and organisational types exhibit preferred mindsets, expressed through behaviours, systems, and artefacts, which influence their ability to grow, innovate, and transform.

What does VUCA mean?

VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It is a concept used to describe the unpredictable and disruptive nature of today's business environment, emphasising the need for individuals, teams, and organisations to accept uncertainty and volatility, and to be agile and adapt quickly to change.

This is because, following the global pandemic, we are living in a world that is both disruptive and continually changing, driven largely by the accelerated pace of technological advancements.

This significantly emphasises the importance of accepting responsibility, being attentive and intentional about who you are being, what you do and say, and the results that are produced at any given moment.

Radical growth involves substantial, transformative changes that result in a major shift in the business model or strategy. Conversely, incremental growth highlights gradual improvements and small adjustments to existing processes or products.

Intrapreneurship involves innovating and creating new ventures within an existing organisation, utilising its resources and support. In contrast, entrepreneurship refers to starting a new business from scratch, often carrying more risk and requiring greater autonomy.

Innovation is vital for the survival and progress of individuals, teams, and organisations, and it spurs societal development, resulting in new technologies, discoveries, and opportunities. It fosters the creation of new, different, and improved methods of doing things, leading to advances by offering valuable solutions to complex issues that improve people’s lives. For companies, innovation is a key factor in boosting performance and growth, as well as enhancing competitiveness, accountability, sustainability, agility, and adaptability in a fast-changing world.

Common barriers to innovation include resistance to change, chaos and uncertainty, insufficient resources, inadequate leadership role modelling and support, inertia and complacency, and a risk-averse culture. Overcoming these barriers requires a strategic and systemic approach, including fostering a human-centric supportive culture that helps people achieve a healthy work-life balance, providing sufficient resources, and promoting a psychologically safe environment that encourages experimentation, collaboration, and smart, calculated risk-taking.ng.

The key principles on the people side of innovation include the ability to self-disrupt habitual thinking and feeling patterns and accept responsibility for self-regulating them. It involves embracing uncertainty, staying focused, maintaining emotional energy, and enacting a passionate purpose that adds value to the quality of people's lives and balances people, profit and planet.

It requires disciplined self-management to build agility, adaptability, and creativity as foundational skills that enable people to think and act differently when making informed choices, taking wise decisions, and solving complex problems through safe experimentation, risk-taking, co-creation, and collaboration.

The goal is to deliver commercial outcomes in a unique way by adopting a strategic and disciplined approach to developing new ideas, products, and digital and technological processes that drive growth, competitiveness, and transformation.

Innovation arises when individuals are emotionally energised and drawn towards a meaningful, purposeful, and compelling future, where an urgent need drives them to participate in challenging, high-impact cultural and organisational change.

Cultivating an innovation culture involves engaging people’s hearts, minds, and souls while empowering, enabling, and equipping them to learn, integrate, embed, and sustain continuous change. This process fosters confidence, capacity, and competence in individuals, allowing them to grow into creative, inventive, and innovative leaders, managers, teams, organisations, and communities that aspire to transform their world.

Leadership is crucial for innovation, as it defines the purpose, sets the vision, and strategic intent to provide clear and meaningful direction that inspires and sparks people's collective intelligence to think and act differently, enabling them to thrive in a disruptive and uncertain world.

Leaders create an emotionally and psychologically safe environment and role model how to strategically align to the purpose and vision, collaborate, take smart risks, experiment, make mistakes to learn quickly, and provide continuous learning and growth opportunities for people.

Leaders empower, enable and equip people to become focused, agile, adaptive, creative, inventive, and innovative in delivering and executing the desired organisational outcomes.