Idea Market is a design game developed to facilitate the pitching and development of new business ideas, while encouraging the formation of partnerships in entrepreneurship programs. The game simulates the dynamics of a startup ecosystem, where participants play both entrepreneurial and investor roles. Each player begins with an individual idea, sketched on paper, and progresses through several competitive and collaborative phases. Visual thinking plays a central role in grounding the startup concept formation by requiring participants to draw and visually represent their ideas. This process helps clarify abstract concepts and encourages rapid iteration, which is crucial in entrepreneurship.
In the game’s first phase, each player pitches their idea to others, attempting to “sell” it in exchange for joining forces with another participant. The sketches act as a visual aid, helping participants communicate their ideas more effectively. These visuals also facilitate discussion, allowing potential partners to see the potential for idea improvement and collaboration. This use of sketching encourages participants to think critically about the integration of different concepts and how best to communicate the evolving startup vision.
The game unfolds in 3 phases:
- Phase 1: Each participant sketches their idea and ventures out to “sell” it to others. Players must convince another participant to buy their idea, leading to a fusion or an abandonment of one of the ideas.
- Phase 2: Players who have paired up now work together to further develop the combined idea or the new idea that resulted from merging both. They then create a second sketch on a new sheet of paper. At this stage, participants focus on refining the idea and preparing for the next phase.
- Phase 3: The pair must now recruit additional members by convincing others to join their team, forming larger groups. The aim is to build a team of at least 8 people, including members from different backgrounds or areas of study. Teams that fail to reach the minimum number of participants cannot proceed to the final stage.
One unique aspect of the game is the flexibility players have: they are free to leave their current team and join another at any point, promoting constant interaction and negotiation. As the game progresses into later phases, pairs must convince others to join their group by presenting their refined ideas visually. The larger and more cohesive the team becomes, the stronger their visual narrative must be. The final phase consists of forming a team of at least eight participants, with each team’s progress being visually tracked on a large kraft paper wall, where all ideas and teams are interconnected through sketches and diagrams.
The images from the implementation of the game demonstrate how participants actively engage in these visual exercises, presenting their ideas, discussing them in teams, and drawing new insights from the collaborative process. The visual representations serve as a shared language, bridging gaps in understanding and making it easier for participants from different backgrounds to converge on a common entrepreneurial vision.
This game was redesigned and perfected for the PIBEP entrepreneurship program. A glimpse of the experience can be seen in this video.
In this particular game implementation, players interacted with the startup selection criteria as physical numbers. This tangible interaction helped them to keep an eye on the next phase in the program: convincing the organizers to get the seed funding available to their startup.
The Idea Market game can also be used to gamify design courses. Each phase can correspond to a design phase, with enough time for designing and improving ideas. See an example in the Service Design course.
