Innovators' Marketplace : Using Games to Activate and Train Innovators

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.

Yukio Ohsawa is a professor of Systems Innovation in the School of Engineering at The University of Tokyo, Japan. He received BE, ME, and PhD from the School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo (1995), then worked for the School of Engineering Science in Osaka University (research associate, 1995-1999), Graduate School of Business Sciences in University of Tsukuba (associate professor, 1999-2005), and moved back to The University of Tokyo. He started researches from non-linear optics, and, via artificial intelligence, created a new domain chance discovery meaning to discover events of significant impact on decision making, since the year 2000. About chance discovery he gave keynote talks in conferences such as International Symposium on Knowledge and Systems Sciences, International Conference on Rough Sets and Fuzzy Sets, Joint Conference on Information Sciences, Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, etc. Chance discovery came to be embodied as innovators' marketplace, a methodology for innovation borrowing principles of the dynamics of markets. When biking home from his job in a business school, he virtually invented the basic idea of Data Jackets as a new tool for enhancing chance discoveries via combining data from various data owners. Since then, he is introducing the method presented in this book to sciences, educations, and businesses. His original concepts and technologies have been published as books and monographs from global publishers such as Springer Verlag or Taylor & Francis. Two most important books among them are, "Chance Discovery" (2003 Springer, with a foreword by Eric von Hippel), "Innovators' Marketplace: Using Games to Activate and Train Innovators" (2012 Springer, with a foreword by Larry Leifer). He edited special issues as guest editors for journals, mainly relevant to chance discovery, such as Intelligent Decision Technologies (2016), Information Sciences (2009), New Generation Computing (2003),Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management (2002), and more. Teruaki Hayashi is a lecturer at The University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Systems Innovation from The University of Tokyo (2017). He was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Systems Innovation, The University of Tokyo (2017-2021). His main research topics are knowledge structuring, data management, retrieval systems, and human behavior modeling in the market of data. His research interests are system design, development of supporting technologies using knowledge structuring and retrieval systems, market design, Web applications with human-computer interaction, and education, focusing on cross-disciplinary data collaboration in the data marketplace and its ecosystem. He had several international invited talks about the tools for activating the data marketplace. For the international research activities, he was the Scientific Committee member of WEHIA2018, the International Programme Committee member of the International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems (KES2018 and 2019), and the organizer of Cross-disciplinary Data Exchange and Collaboration (CDEC) series at IEEE BigData and ICDM (2018-2021), etc. As the social activities, he is the special member of Data Society Alliance (DSA) (previously, Data Trading Alliance (DTA)) in Japan, and in charge of the Vice-Chairperson of Data Utilization Promotion Committee and the expert adviser of the Data Catalog Standardization Project in DSA. The two authors above conducted over 100 workshops on cross-disciplinary data exchange and collaboration introducing data jackets to over 200 companies and institutions in total since 2013. They published the book about "Market of Data" in Japanese in 2017. They also started Data Jacket Association involving companies and institutions. As the social activities, they are contributing to DSA in Japan, by introducing IMDJ and DJs as the