New product development warganing : a constructive way to educate design students

Wargaming is a standard training tool to prepare military officers for real life situations and to help armed forces with developing and testing military plans. Since the mid-1950s, business has also increasingly recognized that the principle of wargaming can be valuable to support planning and decision-making in business management. Various business management games have been developed since then with different purposes including the training of managers and (management) students and helping to test a business strategy. This paper explores the use of "new product development wargaming", which was developed based on the concept of the Russian Open Game and the proven practice of business wargaming by the Product Innovation group at Philips Applied Technologies. , To give new product development training to design students from Eindhoven University of Technology. The use of "new product development wargaming" as a laboratory for design education is studied.