Many companies question how to get their employees to practice innovative habits every day. When SMU MADI first connected with Dallas-Fort Worth’s innovation office, they had already planted the innovation mindset seed in their employees’ minds through an ROI training they had made mandatory a couple of months prior. The ROI ‘Innovative Mindset training’ was a digital module that employees were expected to complete in a self-directed manner. Their next step was to get employees in the habit of using these tips and tricks they learned in the training, every day while doing their job. This is where SMU MADI came in. 

Over the 16-week project period, our team facilitated 12 interviews with DFW airport employees. We quickly realized through these interviews that the definition of innovation is not one size fits all, ultimately this foundational statement helped us to conclude that instead of forcing one plan, we could lean into varied approaches. Additionally, our research uncovered that the Innovation Mindset training distributed by Dallas-Fort Worth Airport’s (DFW) innovation department had not been actively used by DFW Airport employees.  In interviews with DFW airport employees, we asked questions about what they thought about the innovation training and if there was a field for improvement. Overall, we received a lot of feedback and discovered some areas of opportunity. We heard there was a need for using airport examples within the training and that this would make for a tangible ROI for employees. We heard that merit and recognition were important and wanted for participation, and lastly that employees did not get to see the full impact of the training. After interviewing with DFW airport employees, it became apparent that DFW Airport needed a program that could act as a nudge (reminder)  or practice of innovative mindsets after the training. We questioned how we might create a program that encompassed all of these important angels. We believed that habits could lead to the activation of the Innovation Mindset Training and focused on a hunch that we might be able to use gamification as a way of habit-forming. So we reached out to two Gamification experts on the SMU campus, who we believed might be able to help us. We spoke with Dr. Tony Cuevas, who is the assistant dean of technology and innovation at the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, and Gary Brubaker who is the director of SMU Guildhall, which is the number one gaming school in the country. Dr. Cuevas touched on the topics of community, collaboration, and gamifying to make content attractive and appealing and Gary spoke about the importance of using strategies that encourage the players that they are doing great. Additionally, we learned that gamifying can incentivize and accelerate learning while also providing valuable data. It encourages social connection between employees and could allow employees to connect to the culture of DFW airport. After speaking with gamification experts at SMU, our team hypothesized that if we could design a way the innovation mindset content could be experienced repeatedly and accessed anywhere, that might help DFW Airport employees form habits. We questioned how we might take all the things we learned and put it into something we could test. Ultimately coming back to our realization that innovation is not one size fits all so we needed to design something that would be tailored to how the user wants to experience it. 

Based on the findings from our research, interviews, prototyping, and synthesizing, our team designed a two-part virtual innovation mindset experience called Innovation Gamestorming. Innovation Gamestorming takes the three mindsets introduced in the innovation mindset training: questioning, exploring, and experimenting, and pairs them with the original content we designed.

The name Innovation Gamestorming comes from innovation, gamification, and the idea of brainstorming with fun activities. Innovation gamestorming is a digital gamified experience that can be accessed with the use of a computer or a cell phone. 

The first part of the activity is a survey where participants are asked about activities with innovation mindset content via Qualtrics, a survey platform. We wanted to make sure that we were reaching and able to hear the opinions of individuals in every business unit within the DFW Airport headquarters, so we reached out to at least 5 individuals from each unit asking them to participate in our survey. The purpose of the initial survey was to gather information about the participant’s preferences on the number of mindset activities per week they would like to take part in each week when they would like these activities to occur, how they would like to receive nudges (a reminder to participate), and a reflection of the value that proposed merits could bring to them. Innovation is not one size fits all and in order to activate it, we needed to design something that meets different needs based on the participant engaging with it. After we heard how they want to be engaged, the second part of innovation gamestorming would be to have the activities deployed to the participants on a cadence informed by their choices on the initial survey. The activities in innovation gamestorming are defined as fun and engaging prompts grounded on the initial innovation mindset training components (questioning, exploring, experimenting) and consisting of no more than three reflections that are text-based.