Innovators' Marketplace

by Yukio Ohsawa and Yoko Nishihara

Published 1 January 2012
This book presents a powerful method for innovation that reinforces combinatorial and analogical thoughts, with interdisciplinary communications among stakeholders in the market. In this method called Innovators' Marketplace, two games - Innovators' Market Game and Analogy Game - accelerate the spiral of innovation with visualizing data on the connectivity of pieces of existing knowledge. Some players invent ideas by connecting and combining pre-existing knowledge, while others evaluate the ideas to decide whether or not to buy. In a joyful atmosphere created by the games, players look beyond resistance to criticism, as experiments real cases show. They will start thinking and talking about the best segment of the majority, latent requirements in the future market, and scenarios for satisfying those requirements. This process embodies the principle that an interdisciplinary combination of business actors and resources, possibly with the appearance of new actors, triggers innovation.

This book explores the employment of market mechanisms for data-interactive innovations. Based on the concept of innovators' marketplaces the book introduces a new concept of 'data jackets' to enable analysis of what kind of data exist, where they are located, and what kind of information they hold, even if the contents of data cannot be made publicly available.The book presents the concept of a marketplace for data in the case of data-interactive innovations. It introduces the marketplace as a platform for value-based exchange of data and - based on the idea of the innovators' marketplace - explains how data jackets can be utilized independently from the actual contents of the data. Specific chapters deepen the understanding of variables, constraints and intentions as constituent parts of data jackets, and the extension to variable quest, a process towards the design of data. A number of case studies showcases how the methods and processes presented can be employed in real-life contexts. Finally the authors present some extensions of the concept for web-based IMDJ and connections to business information system and an outlook.