Unlocking Innovation Through Serious Play

A jumble of colorful Lego bricks.

At TMRE, Westlake held a session titled, “Is LEGO Serious Play the Secret to Unlocking Insights?” LEGO’s Serious Play is a dynamic tool used by Fortune 500 companies to unlock insights and drive innovation. Participants engaged in the method and explored use cases from industry.

The methodology is said to help people become more expressive storytellers by creating external representations of their ideas with LEGO bricks, which reduces personal judgment and encourages openness. Westlake discusses how constraints like limited LEGO pieces actually enhance creativity, similar to how children use imagination to create fantastical builds. He emphasizes the collaborative nature of the approach, where teams work with identical brick sets but create diverse representations of their ideas.

Getting Hands-On with Serious Play

All Things Innovation: We are here on the last day of TMRE 2025, with one of the session presenters, a workshop presenter, Dr. Garret Westlake, Associate Vice Provost of Innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University. Thank you so much for coming on, just talking a little bit about your session and the show. Your session is really fascinating. It’s all about LEGO Serious Play. I’m sure my daughter would love it, by the way. But it’s all about unlocking the secrets to insights, as you put it. Can you just tell us a little bit more about this framework and system?

Garret Westlake: At its core, what it does so nicely is really help people be more expressive. It helps people be better storytellers. I think we’ve been talking about the role that empathy plays, but this takes it to a whole new level. This allows someone to have a couple minutes to think about what they’re going to build with the bricks, and then they build this external example of their ideas that allows them some space from it. And what the research shows us is that if I share my idea with you, I’m worried you’re going to judge me, and you’re going to judge me and my idea. When I make it external, you’re judging this external thing. You’re not judging me as a person. And therefore, I’m able to be way more expressive and open with you because it all lives in this little LEGO build between us.

All Things Innovation: It really pertains to not only insights, but also innovation. Your specialty is innovation. Can you tell us a little bit about that connection between the two, insights and innovation?

Garret Westlake: I think often we have this idea about where do good ideas come from. How do I be more creative? How do I expand my thinking? And some of the work tells us that constraints are really helpful. So there’s always some pushback when you start putting out packets of LEGO bricks and people say, what? You want me to make a new product with this? And they think at first you want them to actually build it out of the LEGO bricks. I’m supposed to build a toaster out of this? No. You’re supposed to use your imagination. And I think that’s what our children do so well. If we give children LEGO bricks, they can make this magical, fantastical something, and it’s how do we tap back into that. And so the play component comes in that when we’re having fun, when we’re playing, when we’re using our imagination, it helps us be more innovative rather than just standing around a whiteboard and saying, OK, who’s got a good idea?

All Things Innovation: It just brings, as you mentioned, interactivity, creativity, connections and building to the ideation process. Using the buzzwords of the show, it is amplifying the unlocking of the insights or the innovation and being partners with your team, to work more collaboratively.

Garret Westlake: It puts everyone on the same page, too. The workshop that we’re going to do here this afternoon, everyone’s given the same package. So they all have the same bricks. And there’s something nice about seeing all the different ways that people can manipulate those to represent different ideas. And so it again brings the team together because everyone is sort of over the initial embarrassment. We all know we’re playing with these colored bricks. We all know we’re going to be doing silly stories to represent that this little gray brick is an elephant and this one is something else. And that community really helps spark innovation.

The Value of Human Play

All Things Innovation: Let’s just take a look at the TMRE show as a whole. Here we are on day three. What are some of your takeaways? And by that I mean, whether it’s from 20,000-feet up or a specific session you’ve seen, what are some of your thoughts?

Garret Westlake: Obviously, I think there’s been a lot of conversation around AI, rightly so. And we see some groups trying to throw the word human around too. We’re AI. We’re human AI.We’re human insights with AI. I’ve really been reflecting while I think that there’s obviously a need to understand and embrace new technologies. But there’s something really human about play.

There’s something really human around sitting across the table with someone while they build with LEGO bricks and having a conversation about that, that to me still feels incredibly powerful. I think perhaps more powerful than certainly where I think AI is right now. And I think that we as people always are going to value that human connection. We’re going to value play with one another. And so I’ve been struck at that contrast between these new tech tools and these new methods and something old school like LEGOs.

Video: All Things Insights interviewed Dr. Garret Westlake, Associate Vice Provost for Innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University, at TMRE 2025.

Keeping Connected Through Emotional Innovation

A heart beat or pulse rate pinging on a chart, like on a hospital screen.

The Foundation of Emotional Innovation

It may sound rather simple, however, emotionally intelligent innovation is a skill that often needs to be sharpened over time, much like insights professionals often develop consumer empathy techniques. Strategies might include practicing active listening, seeking feedback, engaging in self-reflection, and using techniques to manage stress.

First, there are some core principles to build the foundation of emotional innovation:

  • Innovation is emotional: Emotional innovation moves beyond technical solutions to focus on how products or services connect with people’s hearts, making them more meaningful and successful.
  • Emotions fuel creativity: Positive emotions can enhance cognitive processing, while a strong emotional environment drives creative thinking and innovation.
  • Emotional intelligence is key: The ability to understand and manage your own emotions and those of others is a critical leadership skill for fostering an innovative workplace.

While it may be easy to chalk this whole concept up into simply creating a more positive environment for innovation, through the leadership, team and culture, via an atmosphere of psychological safety and experimentation, it’s a bit more complex than that. Especially in this accelerated age of AI, robotics and smart technologies, it’s easy to overlook the human emotion factor and focus everything on process.

But as Forbes noted in its article, “Here’s Why Emotions Are The Secret Sauce Of Innovation,” “Innovation is not just a cognitive process. It’s emotional. It requires doing something new or novel, and that can be scary because it requires the courage to enter the unknown and it involves learning from experimental failures. Many of us learned as children that success comes from making the fewest mistakes. We learned to avoid making mistakes and looking stupid. We also developed emotional defensives to protect our views of ourselves – to protect our ego. Protecting our ego and fear are the two big emotional inhibitors of innovation.”

The Forbes piece further explores the topic: “How do we begin to see new things that others don’t see? As importantly, how do we perceive reality more accurately – see what we do not usually see? How do we have the courage to explore the unknown? How do we create something new? We have to overcome our fears of failure in order to iteratively learn… We must be more open-minded and less emotionally defensive when our views are challenged by others or by new facts. We must reflectively listen in a nonjudgmental manner. And to do all of that, we absolutely have to manage our emotions and be emotionally intelligent about our and others’ emotions since innovation is a team sport.”

Elevating Emotion to Innovation Outcomes

During FEI25, Craig Dubitsky, Founder and CEO at Happy, held a session on, “Activating Emotional Innovation.” Dubitsky is an innovator with a proven track record of reinventing customer experiences. By incorporating emotional innovation into branding and product development, he effectively solves customer problems and elevates outcomes. In this session, he shared his expertise and insights, covering: defining innovation: realizing technical innovation only occurs when hearts and minds are involved; bringing new life to an organization by manifesting an idea and making it real; reviewing lessons learned from challenger brands being acquired by large corporates; and achieving emotional innovation by learning to solve for the area “under the curve.”

Getting to the Heart of Innovation

So if we accept during this rapid rate of change, to put aside tech and process for a moment, just how does this relate to the organization’s emotionally intelligent view of innovation? It remains important to be emotionally agile, with leadership, team and culture at the forefront.

Activating this involves using emotional intelligence to foster creativity and drive innovation, which requires increasing self-awareness, strengthening empathy and active listening, and learning to regulate emotions. By understanding and managing one’s own emotions and connecting with others on an emotional level, individuals and teams can build courage, enhance cognitive processing, and create a more trusting environment where innovative ideas can thrive.

As Forbes advises, “Organizations must confront these emotional enablers and inhibitors through leadership role modeling, culture, human development and by implementing research-based processes that individuals can use to manage their ego and emotions. Organizations must design their work environments to reduce fears, insecurities, and other negative emotions. One important component is to create an environment of psychology safety.”

Video: “Activating Emotional Innovation” featuring Craig Dubitsky, Founder and CEO at Happy, courtesy of FEI25.

Driving Consumer Perceptions on Innovative Brands

A single dramatic light bulb in profile.

Exploring the Perceived Innovation of Top Brands

In today’s competitive business environment, U.S. companies are striving harder than ever to keep up with their customers’ continuously evolving preferences and demands while simultaneously driving innovation. The American Innovation Index, now in its eighth year of providing insights into the mindset of the American consumer, scores which companies consumers consider the most innovative within their sector (the study looks across 16 industries).

According to the study, consumers perceive and associate innovation with real, tangible experiences such as excellent products, ease of doing business, and responsiveness that make their lives simpler. For brands, that means focusing on innovation where customers feel it most.

The index is based upon research that is conducted and compiled by Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business, Radius Global Market Research, and the Norwegian School of Economics. Those companies that stand out from their competitors in the minds of consumers do so because of their products and services (including continually introducing new ones, offering variety and stylish design, striving for excellence) and being first to market with new ideas. In the minds of consumers, these brands consistently deliver on these qualities.

“The Aii is the only index that ranks the level of innovation based upon consumer perceptions and interactions with a company. It is unique in that it measures innovation from the customer point of view rather than on expert opinions, which often ignore customers’ experiences,” says Barbara Porco, managing director at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business’ Responsible Business Center. “While the index measures innovation, consumers also favor companies that are secure, easy to do business with, have a strong web presence, and have a customer-friendly website and app that makes it easy to conduct business.”

“This study captures consumer sentiment in a variety of ways,” says Gina Woodall, vice president and study lead at Radius. “Companies that are seen as innovative by their customers are overall more appealing and garner greater loyalty, ultimately achieving higher success than others.”

Two observations gleaned from the index include the fact that, while it is often assumed value for the money and reward programs are most important to consumers, these factors are not key in determining whether a company is considered innovative. In addition, the use of AI by a company does not seem to be a major factor in the ways in which consumers perceive it as being innovative or not.

The American Innovation Index Top 10

The Aii 2025 top 10 most innovative companies as chosen by consumers include:

  1. IKEA
  2. Apple
  3. John Deere
  4. Amazon
  5. Microsoft
  6. Honda
  7. Toyota
  8. Samsung
  9. Saks Fifth Avenue
  10. Victoria’s Secret/Pink

Through the combined research efforts of Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business, market research company Radius, and the Norwegian School of Economics, the American Innovation Index scores and ranks the innovativeness of U.S. companies based upon customers’ experiences. The 8th annual study was conducted in May-June 2025, and covers 164 firms from 16 industries, spanning travel, financial services, technology, communications, retailing and manufacturing.

The study surveyed 5,145 consumers and covered 24,236 customer-company relationships. The study is part of the Innovation Index Coalition (IIC), which includes parallel studies in 9 countries.

Insights into the Innovation Index

The study aims to explore how customer-perceived innovation drives brand loyalty, financial performance, and social impact. It’s also not necessarily just about brands and technology (think, Apple), points out Leigh Anne Statuto, executive director of the Responsible Business Center at the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University, in a related webinar.

“While we believe Apple’s innovation is about cutting-edge technology, it’s also about thinking about the customer,” says Statuto. “And when we start to think about that, we think, well, is innovation only linked to the technology industry? You can really bring innovation into so many different industries. . . But when you go down the list, you see automotive industries really leading the way. A lot of that comes from the electric vehicle industry that’s really been pioneered. It really shows that across different industries you can have customer-perceived innovation at the top where you’re really driving the bottom line as well. . . Innovation, in my view, is really thinking differently, and putting customers at the forefront.”

Woodall points out, “The index is really a program of research that is designed to understand, quantify, and compare innovativeness of U.S. brands across industries to identify ways to guide innovation efforts and firm growth. . . So why is customer-perceived innovation important? What our research with our partners has really discovered is that when a company innovates and it has an impact on the customer experience, in terms of the types of products and services offered, changes in the value that’s delivered, how they’re treated as a customer, how they interact—when those things happen and they notice those changes, it elicits positive emotions.”

She adds, “We see consumers feel excited and pleased that they’re doing business with this company, and that leads to brand attractiveness, and ultimately, we’ve proven links to customer loyalty. So, how does it directly impact these key metrics? We took a look at the companies in our index—and there’s over 200 brands in the index—and we’ve broken them up by the least innovative companies, to the moderate, to the most innovative companies.”

The study also determines to show how brand attractiveness is higher among those most innovative companies, their associated NPS scores, and ultimately their share of business.  

“A brand’s perceived innovativeness in a market can have a major impact on its success in converting prospects to users,” asserts Woodall. “Consumers like to work with innovative companies. That means that each customer’s rating up to five brands that they do business with on the key metrics in our study, which are innovation, social innovation, customer loyalty, and brand attractiveness. The American Innovation Index is the degree to which customers view a brand as innovative, creative, pioneering and changing the marketplace.”

Social innovation, another key metric of the study, is the degree to which customers view a brand as innovating on behalf of society and the environment.

“When we look at social innovation, you can see that many of the industries that were high on innovation are also high on social innovation, particularly automotive and consumer durables. I think it’s interesting, but not surprising, that we see tech has moved down a little bit further in terms of social innovation,” adds Woodall. “It’s important—a company like Amazon that we just exemplified here—they’re number six on innovation, but they’re number 39 on social innovation. It’s important for brands to think not only about innovation, but also about social innovation, if they want to be truly, what we call transformative, and get the benefit of increased loyalty by being strong in both.”

Download the American Innovation Index report at Radius Insights.

Video: “The American Innovation Index: Making Innovation Drive the Bottom Line,” a webinar featuring Gina Woodall of Illuminas/Radius, and Leigh Anne Statuto, Fordham University. They explore how the American Innovation Index ranks nearly 200 U.S. brands on innovation and social innovation—based entirely on customer perceptions. Video courtesy of Radius Insights.

Applying Insights to Gaming Innovation

Futuristic image of woman wearing glowing virtual reality headset.

Stringfield’s session provided a glimpse at technological developments and how it connects to innovation trends, gamer insights, and enhancing the user experience. He demonstrates how gaming has historically helped contextualize new technologies by creating emotional connections and meeting human needs for socialization. The presentation argues that successful AI innovation must prioritize human experience over technology itself, drawing parallels between how people relate to video games and how they now interact with AI assistants like Copilot.

Excerpts from Stringfield’s session are presented below:

Video Games as Technology Translators

I’m a fairly new entrant to Microsoft. I joined via the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Activision Blizzard’s a very large video game company and I worked there in monetization. Moving over to Microsoft, I still work in monetization but that’s now part of the Microsoft AI organization. When we think about Microsoft and the concept of innovation, what does tend to come to mind is AI. And I think a lot of us have struggled with what’s the right framework to think about how we develop with these new technologies and what bearing it has on the future.

What I found during my time in the video game sector is that video games actually serve as really interesting mechanisms through which we can incorporate human needs into understanding technologies. I’m going to talk a little bit about innovating the future in AI using things like looking on the history of contextualizing video games as our cognitive map for doing so.

When we think about how AI is going to influence how we’re continually looking through information, it’s on the basis of this being a more conversational and personalized relationship. So therefore, the ways in which we start to relate in terms of conversational, more emotive, and effective mechanisms to communication do tend to be rooted in things like video games.

We’ll show how this kind of starts to go towards this concept of this as a means through which we are connecting with technology, therefore understanding human intent and how we connect with technology will be important for understanding AI given that we’re looking at increasing levels of abstraction away from the computer level and more towards the human level of interface.

We are All Gamers to Some Degree

When we look at how consumers are starting to think about the Internet now, I think we are starting to see the future is this more AI-based agentic Internet. There’s a couple different ways we could articulate it.

But within there, you’ll see that I’ve changed the articulation of what differentiates these, less on value and how creation happened for users. If you think about Web 1.0, this required a high degree of technicality. Yes, platforms exist, but for you to really do anything on the Internet, you needed to know how to code. More specifically, you need to know how to use HTML. The technical requirement for using technology is pretty high.

In this light, the innovation of Web 2.0 wasn’t social networks per se, though they scaled them. To be clear, the real innovation is that it made stuff easier for consumers. So instead of me having to learn how to code HTML, I could create stuff, share about myself and things I care about through a login in a pretty easy interface.

It follows then that if you think about where we were potentially going towards an AI agentic conversational web, this is a further abstraction in terms of how we work with technology that is much easier.

How many people have a game on your phone? What I need you to understand is that the average gamer is not a teenage boy. They’re just as likely to identify as female as male. About 48% of game players are female. The average age is thirty-four. They’ve been playing games for 20 years. People play games and it’s the largest form of entertainment in the world. It’s about two hundred billion by 2027. That’s bigger than the box office, the music industry, most of streaming, and all three of those combined.

What’s also fun about it is that if we think about how we’ve related to gaming over the years, it’s helped us contextualize new technologies on a fairly regular basis. In fact, as long as there have been digital screens, there have been digital games.

Moving on to touchscreen phones, for those of you that are under the age of thirty five, you need to understand that phones used to have buttons and when we went from a world where we had buttons to not buttons, this wasn’t necessarily an easy jump. Understanding the controls of a touchscreen was done through swiping candies or pulling back slingshots or things like that. Again, here too, we learned about this technology through the lens of games. Games are a very human way for us to relate to technology because games solve very human needs for us to connect, to socialize, and to have fun.

Forming the Right Partnerships

My team did some research a few years back in terms of how game players really relate to the people that they care about. Almost everyone raised their hand when I asked whether or not you had a game on your phone, so you would be included in the sample. What we found is that as it pertained to how we really connect with people we care about, games are more popular than social media. In fact, it was the third most likely response. Only text and calls were above that and only marginally so.

What we’re finding is that we have large amounts of consumers increasingly interacting with various intelligences in ways that they are socializing and connecting on deeper effective levels.

By looking at these types of technologies and how they’ve basically been embedded in the history of tech and how users have oriented themselves towards them, it gives us an interesting road map to think about other technologies where in theory we’re supposed to have these deeper relationships with. In short, the idea is we can look at some of the lessons that we’ve learned from gaming and apply them to innovation at the forefront in things like AI.

On the AI side, we’ve been on a little bit of a journey with Copilot. Last year, it was really about streamlining the UX, getting rid of the clutter, making sure that the core user experience was preserved. This year, we’re going pretty deep on personalization both for the brands and the users. We want to make sure that whatever is coming out of these technologies is highly relevant to the user. Where Microsoft sees this going is the agentic web.

The idea is that we will have AI agents working on our behalf. And in terms of commerce, brands will have agents working on their behalf that are very familiar with the brand. And instead of me going to the web and going to a bunch of links and going in and looking through web pages and trying to compare all this stuff, these tools are going to negotiate that for us.

But what that means then is we think about what is embedded within these agents, there are some baseline stuff we want such as business insights, making sure it understands brand voice and empathy. We are trying to build trust and connection between these agents that are supposed to be working on behalf of the user, understanding that this is a different way that people are relating to technology that is more conversational and personalized.

To sum up, we need to make sure it’s non-intrusive, contextually relevant, and that there’s a reward or payout for the user. All based on human principles, all based on the fact that we understand that consumers have a deeper than superficial connection to their games and in theory, we want them to have a deeper than superficial connection to their agents via Copilot.

That’s the basic idea. I think what we found is that as we continue to look forward at how we might innovate in new fields of technology, how humans integrate with these technologies is going to be that much more important.

Video: “Using Innovation as a Differentiator,” featuring Jonathan Stringfield, VP, Global Revenue & Business Planning at Microsoft, courtesy of FEI25.