Communities of Creativity — Studio Lumibec's Innovation Pipeline

A four-round, advanced innovation-management simulation set inside Studio Lumibec, a 620-person Montréal interactive-entertainment studio (CA$180M revenue, ~70% from one aging franchise) running on a fixed CA$36M R&D budget. The studio's real competitive edge is not its process but its three voluntary communities of practice — a rendering guild, a narrative circle and a gameplay-systems community — where craft knowledge is created and circulated and where every original hit was incubated, fuelled by 20% protected slack time. In May 2026 the flagship is sliding -12% a year, the board demands a fatter pipeline AND lower cost, and the CFO wants to scrap the slack to redeploy it onto a 9-month sequel. Playing the VP Innovation, you have one planning cycle to set the model. Round 1: diagnose where creative knowledge actually flows (the communities, not the org chart), read the leading indicators (engagement -40%, two connectors at flight risk), and judge how dependent the pipeline is on slack-born experiments. Round 2: allocate protected slack against the CFO's pressure — how much, for whom, and under what governance — discovering that slack without community structure is just unfocused free time that costs money without lifting throughput, while cutting it to zero optimises the quarter and empties the future. Round 3: split the CA$36M budget between exploiting the proven franchise and exploring original IP, confronting March's ambidexterity tension — too little exploration starves the future, a hard swing to 50/50 starves the sequel that funds everything — and decide how communities feed the funnel without being managed into committees. Round 4: build the prototype pipeline with stage-gate go/kill discipline, retain (or lose) the two senior knowledge connectors whose network value far exceeds their headcount, and commit to leading metrics over lagging ones. The model rewards stewarding communities (managing with, not over, per Cohendet), slack channelled through communities, a balanced explore/exploit split, an emergent stage-gate funnel, and retaining the connectors — and punishes the five classic errors: cutting slack to protect the quarter, ungoverned slack, over-swinging to exploration, mandating communities like project teams, and letting the connectors walk. Final KPIs track idea throughput, community engagement, time-to-prototype and a derived Innovation ROI.