When I started thinking about how to teach innovation, I quickly realized that the standard approaches don't work very well. You can't lecture innovation into existence. You can't quiz students on it. You can't grade them on whether their ideas are "right." Innovation is fundamentally about generating new combinations of things — a process that traditional teaching methods are uniquely badly suited to support.
That realization is what led me to build a card game instead of writing a textbook.
Why Games Match the Shape of Innovation
Innovation has a specific cognitive shape. It requires the ability to combine unrelated things in unexpected ways, hold multiple possibilities in your head at once, take action on incomplete information, and respond quickly to feedback. None of those are skills that lectures develop. All of them are skills that games can develop, when the games are designed correctly.
Researchers like Karl Kapp have written extensively about why games work as learning tools. The short version: games create immediate feedback loops, give players autonomy in how they approach a problem, and add emotional stakes to actions that would otherwise feel inert. For teaching innovation specifically, games have an additional advantage — they can force players to combine elements that wouldn't otherwise come together. A well-designed innovation game makes the act of unexpected combination automatic.
This is also why gamified learning works so well for innovation in particular. The game mechanics aren't a coating over the lesson. They're the lesson. Every action a player takes during a good innovation game is also a small rep of the cognitive moves real innovators make.
What I've Learned Building One
When I designed Products: The Card Game, I wanted the game itself to do the teaching. Players draw random feature cards and product cards and have to combine them into something pitch-able. The combinations are usually absurd — a feature like "self-cleaning" combined with a product like "soccer ball" — but the act of finding a way to make even an absurd combination work is the same cognitive move that real innovation requires. You can't teach this by explaining it. You can only teach it by getting students to do it, repeatedly.
I've watched this play out in classrooms across the United States and overseas in Uzbekistan, where I've helped educators bring this style of teaching into their curriculum. The pattern is the same wherever the game shows up. Students who started the session insisting they "weren't creative" end it producing more ideas than they can write down. Nothing about their underlying creativity changed. The game just gave them a structured, low-pressure way to use it.
This connects to broader patterns in experiential learning and learning by doing — game-based learning is essentially a special case of those broader philosophies, with the game providing the structured experience and the immediate feedback that drives the learning.
If you're a teacher trying to bring innovation into your classroom and you're considering game-based approaches, the practical advice I'd give is fairly specific. First, choose games where the core mechanic exercises the actual cognitive skill you want students to develop. A game with innovation themes pasted on top isn't the same as a game whose mechanics force innovation. The distinction matters enormously. Second, plan a debrief after every game session — the structured reflection is what turns a game into a teaching tool. I've covered this in detail in how to implement game-based learning.
Third, schedule games regularly rather than as one-off events. Innovation skills, like any other skills, develop through repeated practice. A weekly game session compounds in a way that a single session never can.
The biggest mental shift game-based learning requires from teachers is trusting that students can develop a skill through repeated play without being formally taught it first. That trust feels uncomfortable at first — most teachers were trained to lecture before practicing. But once you've watched students develop genuine innovation capacity through structured play, you stop wanting to go back to the old way. I haven't, and the teachers I work with usually don't either.
Innovation is hard to teach. Games make it easier — when you choose the right games and use them with intent.
About the Author
Aaron Heienickle is the founder of Skypig and the creator of Products: The Card Game, a hands-on entrepreneurship game played in classrooms, family game nights, and corporate offsites across the country.
He started Skypig his senior year of high school and has been building it ever since. Aaron studied Marketing and Computer Science at the University of Missouri, where he co-founded the 4impact social entrepreneurship pitch competition, and is a regular at Missouri Startup Weekend — one of the largest pitch competitions in the state.
Through Skypig, Aaron has worked with educators, students, and corporate teams to bring entrepreneurship to life through doing — not just discussing. Learn more about Aaron.