Spark the Team — Vanta Play's Breakthrough Pod

A four-round, intermediate innovation-leadership simulation set inside Vanta Play Ltd, a Manchester consumer-technology company (GBP 78M revenue, 290 staff, a thin 9% operating margin) whose last three product launches were safe refreshes that lost shelf share. On 12 January 2026 the board bets the next 18 months on a single breakthrough product to be unveiled at IFA Berlin on 4 September — a hard, unmovable date 34 weeks away, with retailers already holding shelf space worth ~GBP 22M in first-year revenue if the date slips. You are a first-time innovation leader handed a blank brief, a GBP 2.4M development budget, and a pool of 14 strong but very different internal candidates. Across four rounds you (1) staff an eight-person pod from the 14, engineering a deliberate balance of divergent idea-generators and convergent finishers and deciding whether to take the brilliant-but-abrasive star; (2) set the freedom-vs-focus leadership dial and design a reward approach that protects intrinsic motivation instead of crowding it out with controlling cash prizes; (3) allocate the ~10 front-end weeks across diverge, converge and validate, and set a defensible concept-freeze date against the 18-week engineering build; and (4) take the team to the week-12 stage-gate, pitching a concept that is BOTH novel AND useful while resolving the star designer's live quit-or-comply ultimatum. The math is built on Friedrich's psychology of leading creative people, Guilford's divergent/convergent thinking, the novelty-AND-usefulness two-criterion test, and Amabile/Deci-Ryan's intrinsic-motivation crowding-out — so every classic wrong move measurably underperforms: an all-stars pod with no finishers makes time-to-prototype explode; maximal freedom burns the front-end window and never aligns; over-control crashes team motivation; big cash prizes crater idea-sharing; never freezing forces a safe refresh; and firing or capitulating to the star costs either the boldest idea or the team. Four KPIs are tracked all the way to the gate: Idea Novelty, Idea Usefulness, Team Motivation, and Time-to-Prototype readiness — and the gate passes only when the concept is novel, useful, the team is motivated, and a credible path to a 4 September prototype is on the clock.