Imagine you run a young games start-up. Your first social online game, Stylista, is about to launch on Facebook, and you need fresh capital to grow. But investors don't fund a game. They fund a pipeline. That was the challenge for Sandbox Global, an internet start-up based in Hong Kong and Bangkok. Its founder and CEO, Ferdinand Gutierrez, asked Thinkergy to help his team build a pipeline of follow-up game concepts that would make their pitch to investors compelling.

We agreed on a short but intense X-IDEA Innovation Project. First, a small core team of founders spent a day of Xploration studying trends and business patterns in social online gaming, and defining what Sandbox did and didn't want to be. Two insights changed the game. First, avoid thinking in classical game genres, so you can think outside the industry box. Second, don't chase management games, even though they had the highest user numbers. Instead, the team found its point of difference in the very essence of games: play and fun. Interestingly, fun turned out to come in four flavors: hard fun, easy fun, people fun and serious fun.

On August 30, 2011, about 16 founders, game designers, developers and tech people from the U.S., Germany, Thailand, France and the UK gathered at the Renaissance Hotel in Bangkok for the main workshop. In two teams, they worked through Ideation, Development, Evaluation and Action in a single 10-hour day on the Final Challenge: How to create fun social online games for Facebook? During Ideation, raw ideas covered the room, on sticky notes, on flip charts, and even on paper planes pegged to a washing line.

The magic happened when Development began. On giant flip charts along the walls, we had laid out a Field of Interesting Ideas with four idea zones, one for each kind of fun. The teams walked the room, picked their most intriguing raw ideas, and planted each one in its zone. Soon the field was full, and as people stood in front of it, they started to see connections. Some ideas were strong enough to grow into concepts on their own. Others clicked together with their neighbors into something bigger. In no time, raw ideas became full-fledged game concepts. It was a joy to watch, and a perfect demonstration of how the stages of X-IDEA connect: the insights from Xploration shaped the idea zones, and the idea zones made Development fast. In other words, to design fun games, the team first had to take fun seriously.

At the end of the day, each team pitched its top five game concepts to a joint jury, which earmarked the best ones for the game pipeline. As Ferdinand put it, the workshop “brought out several game concepts that are now in our plans for build.” Stylista launched, and Sandbox Global went on to secure its next round of funding. The collaboration didn't end there. Years later, as the founding CEO of Ampverse, a gaming and esports marketing company that connects brands with gamers and young audiences across Southeast Asia, Ferdinand called on Thinkergy again, this time to get the people side of his business right with TIPS.

Does your start-up need more than one hit to convince investors? Contact us to find out how X-IDEA may help your team build a pipeline of fresh product concepts in a single day, and turn what your customers love most into your competitive edge.