We have a lot of meetings at the Institute of Design. And I mean a lot of meetings. These meetings typically run anywhere from 2-5 hours (and sometimes a lot longer). Most often, problems occur when you have competing directions from different members of a team, and so I did some research to look into what other companies do to make meetings more productive.

It is difficult to foster trust and collaboration in a business that requires employees to pitch ideas and face potential rejection. To cultivate these values, and help mitigate the stress that comes with competition, Lavoie created a business game called “Mutual Fun.” Mutual Fun is an internal stock exchange game designed to create a safe environment for promoting (or “killing”) ideas. How it works is that an idea is proposed and placed into one of three separate markets: "Savings Bonds,” which are ideas that can save the company money; “Bow Jones,” which consists of ideas that utilize existing technology for new products or services; and “Spazdaq,” which is made up of ideas of new technologies for exploration. Each idea is listed as an individual stock in one of the aforementioned markets and every employee is given ten thousand dollars of play money to invest in ideas. In the spirit of creating community, each idea needs not just a creator but also a mentor or “prophet” to be an evangelist for the idea. Interestingly, Mutual Fun falls outside of an employ’s typical work and yet employee involvement is as high as 95%. This is due in part to the face that while Mutual Fun is a “community service” project (benefitting the company as a whole), bonuses are based on participation in the game. The gamification of idea generation (tied to real monetary incentives) serves to promote innovation and also encourages a sense of community. The popularity of the game even became a product itself as several large corporations have licensed it for their own use.