Innovation Systems for Sustainability – Simulation Game

Instructions for Seminar Facilitators

Overview

Duration	Players	Materials
60 min	10 - apprx. 15	Role Cards, 52 card deck, score board, watch

Materials Needed

The only things you really need are a standard card deck with 52 cards and the role cards. A watch and a score board will make the game easier to facilitate.

Role Cards

For each role there is a role card. The government and industry should be given out only once. The other roles can be given out more often. I recommend to play with at least two university and two company researchers. When playing with only ten people, consider giving one citizen the NGO role as a bonus. When playing with 15 players, you may want to add at least one more innovator. The election after round 5 offers the players a chance to obtain a new role. If the government is replaced, the old government becomes a citizen, either trading with the citizen that has been elected as new government or taking the card of whoever replaces the other role. For example, if the industry player is elected as the new government, a citizen replaces them as industry (usually this can be quickly decided through volunteers or through another small election). You may also ask the group if they want to switch some roles voluntarily at this point, without it impacting game play.

Score Board

To help with keeping score, you can download an excel tool. By splitting the workbook view, you can show one sheet to the students which automatically updates when you insert the points of each round. Comments in the file will show you how it works.

Game Instructions and Player Rules

The game instructions can be found in the rules Section. While it is not important for students to have a clear understanding of all roles, as facilitator you should be aware of all role’s functions and special features.

One of the most interesting aspects of the game arises when students begin to interact with the rules themselves. The instructions do not cover all possible cases and eventualities.

For example, the instructions do not specify what else government can do. Usually students quickly think of certain new rules. They may wonder, for example, if government can pass a law which requires a certain number of environmental innovations to be played, such as one every round, or one for every two normal innovations etc.

The instructions also do not specify wether or not students can change seats (assuming you play sitting around a table). Or wether the industry roles can fire its researchers, or if they can quit etc.

Depending on your specific teaching needs, this may even be an asset. However, you are of course free to adapt, add or change rules as you see fit. For example, if you are interested in teaching about the importance of clustering, maybe space out the researcher roles for the first five rounds and only allow them to move afterwards.

While it makes sense to think about some possible extra rules, your students are likely going to surprise you with an idea for a new rule or option during the game anyways.

One of the more obvious loopholes that students will ask about is to consume something else than the specified 5, or 3 coins. While I was expecting the environmentally conscious roles to eventually stop consuming all together, I was very amused when an economy-minded citizen asked if they could consume more.

Use your own judgement in these cases. Part of the fun is to create institutional innovation, such as new rules, but as facilitator make sure that a single change does not destroy the entire mechanism of the game. For example, consuming for 10 instead of 5 may still be a fun new player behavior and is likely to cancel out with other consuming less; consuming for 100 on the other hand may be too much.

Time Management

Ask your participants to read through the game instructions before coming to the seminar. With some time to cover questions, and a brief repetition of the rules, you have about 50 minutes for the 10 rounds. This means that on average one round should take 5 minutes. As facilitator you should keep an eye on the overall time and try to develop a feeling for the flow of the game. The first rounds will take a bit longer for everyone to settle in. So will round 5 with the election. Use this to your advantage to add some mild stress in other rounds, so that the innovators cannot think too long about which cards to play.

The flow of the game is greatly helped if each group (citizens and funding bodies) sum up their points for you.

Learning Objectives – Sustainability Skills

Hopefully this is not only all fun and games but also teaches some aspects of innovation and sustainability. The assigned reading here is chosen to highlight that innovation is a phenomenon happening embedded in a system. But other readings and points could perhaps also be made with the game. For example, if you are more interested in the geography of innovation, perhaps a paper about spillover effects together with new rules regarding the seating arrangements works better for you.

Here are some questions that can be used directly after the game and in a follow up seminar, after students have read the assigned paper. It is of course also possible to require the reading before the game is played and have the discussions directly following the game.

Apart from the topical knowledge, these questions also focus on other sustainability competencies (Brundiers et al. 2021).

Post Game Questions

1. What happened?
2. How did you feel in your role?
3. Do you feel you “won”?
4. What moment was decisive for the game outcome?
5. What were you thinking about the other players in the game?
6. Did something that could have happened not happen (e.g., the government passing laws? Citizens stopping to consume at all?) Why or why not?

Questions on System Functions

1. If we think about to the iceberg heuristic (Figure 1), can we identify new or different ways in which functions were fulfilled?
2. What knowledge was developed in the game? By whom and when?
3. How is knowledge diffused both in the game and in reality?
4. What would have happened if one (or both) of the indicators were more delayed?
5. What would have been needed to have a different game?
6. How aware were you of the game mechanisms during the game versus after? What changed?

Figure 1: Innovation Iceberg

Feedback

If you have any feedback for the game, any questions, or have tried something similar I would love to hear from you! The game can certainly be improved in many ways, one of the most obvious ones is to include some sort of market mechanism for doing more with the innovations that are played. That or any other ideas for future improvements are very welcome.

License

This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Brundiers, Katja, Matthias Barth, Gisela Cebrián, Matthew Cohen, Liliana Diaz, Sonya Doucette-Remington, Weston Dripps, et al. 2021. “Key Competencies in Sustainability in Higher Education—Toward an Agreed-Upon Reference Framework.” Sustainability Science 16 (1): 13–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00838-2.