The room becomes the ecosystem.
The Summit is a live strategy game about influence, alliances and innovation — where participants represent different players trying to shape the future of an emerging ecosystem.
Everyone enters with different interests, information and objectives. Then negotiation starts. Alliances form. Priorities collide. And the system begins to move.
Everyone wants something. Nobody controls the system.
Strategy becomes interesting when other people have a strategy too.
Participants represent different organisations inside an emerging innovation ecosystem. Each organisation has its own position, capabilities, ambitions and strategic interests.
No team has enough information, influence or resources to determine the outcome alone.
Players therefore have to negotiate, exchange information, build coalitions and decide when to cooperate — and when their own interests require them to push in another direction.
The resulting ecosystem is not scripted. It emerges from what the participants actually do.
There is no algorithm deciding how the other actors behave.
They are sitting across the room from you.
Enter with a strategy. Leave with a different one.
The structure creates pressure and direction, but participants create the actual story.
Take a position
Each team represents an ecosystem actor with its own goals, strengths, information and strategic interests.
Find leverage
Exchange information, identify dependencies and negotiate with actors whose interests only partly overlap with yours.
Build coalitions
Form partnerships and temporary alliances to increase influence and move strategic decisions in your direction.
Face disruption
New challenges and opportunities change incentives, forcing teams to reconsider commitments and relationships.
Influence the system
Individual decisions accumulate into ecosystem-level outcomes, power shifts and unexpected new coalitions.
Strategy lives in the tension between objectives.
How far can you optimise your own outcome before weakening relationships the system needs?
Do you share what you know to mobilise others, or protect information because it gives you leverage?
When does joining forces increase your options — and when does commitment constrain your next move?
Collaboration is difficult to learn from a slide.
Frameworks can describe alliances, power and competing interests. But knowing the vocabulary is different from experiencing the behaviour.
The Summit puts participants in situations where strategic collaboration actually has consequences.
Participants experience the dynamics before analysing them.
Teams make trade-offs while the situation continues to evolve.
Tension, trust, influence and coalitions develop naturally.
Try strategic behaviours without real-world consequences.
Who leads? Who follows? Who gets left out?
The game makes patterns visible that are often difficult to discuss directly: coalition-building, informal power, information asymmetry and collaborative leadership.
And because participants created those dynamics themselves, the debrief has something real to work with.
The game ends. The interesting conversation starts.
Participants reconstruct what happened and why.
Which alliances mattered? Where did information create power? Which actors became central? When did collaboration work? Where did competing incentives block collective progress?
The facilitated debrief connects behaviour in the game to real questions about strategy, partnerships, ecosystem leadership and collaboration.
One live game. Several reasons to use it.
University programmes
Bring ecosystem strategy, innovation and collaboration to life inside bachelor, master or executive programmes.
Leadership development
Explore influence, negotiation and collaborative leadership when nobody has full authority.
Corporate team days
Replace another team exercise with a substantive shared strategic experience.
Conferences & events
Turn participants from an audience into active actors inside a shared ecosystem challenge.
Designed to take over the room.
Playful on the surface. Systems thinking underneath.
The Summit is informed by innovation ecosystems, alliance strategy and innovation-management principles.
Roles, incentives and strategic choices are designed to create interdependence without predetermining how participants resolve it.
Serious learning can still feel like play.
Innovative Dutch works with universities, business schools and organisations internationally.
Put your participants inside the strategy.
Tell us who will be in the room and what you want them to experience. We can help determine whether The Summit fits your programme, team or event.