The Building Partnerships Canvas, An Interactive Game by XPLANE!

Object of play: The partnership canvas is a tool that enables visualization of current and/or future partnerships. It can also be used for early testing of the value creating potential of a partnership between two partnership candidates. The tool’s purpose is to define your business priority for partnering, and empathize with your partner to explore whether there is potentially a match. The partnership canvas can be used as a stand-alone tool, but comes to full strategizing value when it is jointly used with the business model canvas.

Bart Doorneweert & Ernst Houdkamp www.valuechaingeneration.com

Number of players: This can be done by yourself, but preferably with 2 teams of max 5 people representing each side of the partnership. Alternatively, make multiple pairs if there are more people.

Duration of play: (60-90 min):
- Step 1- Define intent (15 min)
–Step 2- Design partnership (15 min/sketch)
–Step 3- Bring teams to the negotiating table (15 min)
–Step 4- Evaluate the negotiation results and define next steps (20 min)

How to play
1. Define intent
a)    Describe the aim or goal of the partnership for your business
b)    List what would be ideal partners to work with and why. Organize a post up. Select a top partnership candidate, or multiple candidates.
c)    Create (multiples of) 2 teams; 1 representing your business, 1 for a potential partner’s business.
2. Design partnership
a)    Each team identifies their desired assets in their respective partner’s business model
b)    Teams sketches out a partnership canvas from their own team’s perspective using stickie notes to define each building block
3. Bring teams to the negotiating table
a)   Each team presents their partnership canvas
b)   Compare the two partnership canvasses by mirroring the partnership perspectives. Compare between  value offers of one team, to desired value of the other team, and whether there is mutual understanding of the transfer activities. Check for a clear fit.
c)   Create agreement on the created value for each partner. Adapt partnership canvas and iterate step 3 if required.
4. Evaluate the negotiation results and define next steps
a)   Do the elements of created value provide clear added value to each partner’s business?
b)   Define next steps to effectuate the partnership

Mirroring Partnership Perspectives

Strategy: The partnership canvas can be used to explore the idea of engaging in a partnership. A team can use the canvas to prepare for an upcoming conversation with a potential partner. Alternatively the session can be conducted jointly with a potential partner if there is already a mutual interest to explore partnering possibilities. The tool can firstly be used to determine whether there is a technical fit between two businesses. By working in teams and negotiating certain rivalry is always invoked, and teams can also get a sense of cultural fit between two partnering businesses.
In order to obtain full strategizing value from use of the canvas, it is advised to integrally work with the business model canvas. In the end, the partnership discussion is a key step in business model innovation

Gamestorming by XPLANE!

Creativity and invention has long been seen as a “black box.” As business people, we don’t typically try to understand this process. We fully expect that when designers, inventors, and other creative people go into a room with a goal, they will come out with more or less creative discoveries and results. Although when we watch them at work, we can observe some combination of sketching, animated conversations, messy desks, and drinking. But the fundamental nature of what happens in that room remains mostly a mystery.
It’s easy to leave creativity to the creative types, and say to yourself, “I’m just not a creative person.” The fact is that in a complex, dynamic, competitive knowledge economy, it’s no longer acceptable to take this position. If you are a knowledge worker, you must become, to some degree, creative.
That may sound a bit scary, but the fact is that successful creative people tend to employ simple strategies and practices to get where they want to go. It’s not so much that they employ a consistent, repeatable process that leads to consistent creative results. It’s more like a workshop with a set of tools and strategies for examining things deeply, for exploring new ideas, for performing experiments and testing hypotheses, to generate new and surprising insights and results.
So we set out, much like the brothers Grimm, to collect the best of these practices wherever we could find them, with a special focus on Silicon Valley, innovative companies, and the information revolution.
Many of these practices emerged from a kind of “Silicon soup” – the deeply interconnected network of Silicon valley, where ideas and people cross-pollinate like bees in a single massive hive. The practices live in a mostly oral culture, passed along from person to person by word of mouth. For example, a consultant uses an approach with a client, and the client begins to employ that approach internally. Over time, as more people employ a method, it evolves into something quite different, and over time the source of the original idea or approach may be lost. Sometimes methods are written down and sometimes, like folk tales, they exist in many different versions in many places.
We chose to call this practice “Gamestorming” because it seemed to come closer to describing the phenomenon than anything else we could think of.
Our goal with this collection was to find the best of these tools and practices and bring them together into a single place.
It is our hope that you will contribute games based on your personal knowledge and experience, that you will help us clarify the history of the ideas and practices, and that through your comments you can help us all better understand the complex and fascinating history of games at play in creative work.

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Company source: http://www.xplane.com/