Sandbox Global is a Hong Kong- and Bangkok-based internet start-up company who focuses on designing social online games for internet-based platforms such as Facebook. Shortly before the launch of their first game “Stylista”, the company approached Thinkergy to help them work on a social online game pipeline that they needed before approaching new investors for raising a new round of fresh capital.

Thinkergy agreed with the Sandbox team on a short, yet very intense X-IDEA Innovation Project that helped the start-up company to fill it’s game pipeline with some interesting social online game concepts.

After an initial project immersion into the topic, a small core team did a day of Xploration to Xplore trends and business patterns in the social online gaming industry. The Xploration phase gave the Sandbox team valuable insights (such as “Avoid thinking in classical game genres to think out-of-the industry box” or “Don’t aim for management games, although these have the highest user numbers), and helped the team to identify a direction to create meaningful differentiation from other players in the gaming industry based on the concepts of “play” and “fun”.

As a result of the Xploration, we identified 4 areas of “play and fun” games (hard fun, easy fun, people fun, serious fun). In the subsequent main X-IDEA Innovation Project Workshop, we used these four areas as “idea zones” to harvest and structure interesting raw ideas. Thereby, two teams worked for a full day of Ideation, Development, Evaluation and Action on the Final Challenge: “How to create fun social online games for Facebook?” Towards the end of the 10-hour workshop, the two teams pitched their top 5 game concepts to a joint jury, who then earmarked which game concepts should enter the firm’s game pipeline for the next round of fund-raising and subsequent activation.