IYA's Innovation Quest offers a series of dynamic experiences that aim to accelerate, cultivate, and support qualified student-led ventures at the intersection of business, technology, and creative practice. This yearlong immersive journey of programming is designed to empower founders, foster innovation, and create a lasting impact within the Academy and Trojan community, serving as a catalyst for innovation and visions realized. Embracing the Academy's intersectional challenge-based reflective learning principles, the Innovation Quest takes learning and entrepreneurial growth from the classroom to the boardroom and beyond and into the hands of creators, as students construct and refine their founder toolkits and nurture skills to address challenges at scale. 

Role: Co-lead with Prof Tina Sharkey

The IYA Venture Pyramid provides an easy-to-understand way to communicate the status and needs of a venture. It's like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs but for a venture and not a person. The system is used in courses where each student team has individualized needs. It provides a structure for ambitious students to unlock specialized resources and climb to the top.

The IYA Venture Pyramid placement rating includes:
1. Stage Number - 1-6 (e.g. defining where the venture is in its journey)
2. Component Rating - 1-5 stars (e.g. strength rating of the venture’s current components)

Role: Faculty lead

IYA and the Marshall School of Business offer a joint, 4-year Bachelor of Science degree (BUIN) that prepares students to become leaders at the intersection of technology, business, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Graduates of this joint degree will gain specialized expertise to make them competitive leaders and professionals in both innovative business practices and technological advancements, preparing them to drive change across industries. 

This degree utilizes a signature integrated core spanning technology, design, and business while leveraging the Academy’s unique Challenge Based Reflective Learning methodology. Upon graduating, students will be equipped with cross-cutting fluency and modern frameworks across technology, business, and creativity for disruptive innovation. 

Role: Faculty lead (IYA)

Co-founded this lab at USC as a research space to push conventional wisdom about what games are and can be. Designed a skunkworks environment separate from the constraints of commercial game development.  Developed methodologies and published research on innovation. Developed a special interest in applying research psychology to product design. Among other things, I applied the theories of flow and intrinsic motivation to playable systems. Lab benefactors included Gates Foundation, National Science Foundation, NIH, Rockefeller Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, US State Dept, ABC News, LA Times, and others.

Role: Co-founder/Director

Work with the amazing people building Figma. Offer what help I can in regard to education initiatives.

Role: Board of Advisors

Mentor founders going through Techstars accelerator programs including the USC Techstars University Catalyst

Role: Mentor

Created this USC student organization, Fight On Founders, to address common challenges facing student founders via regular campus events. Events are designed to a) illuminate students on the opportunities and problems found in industry verticals that students would have no exposure otherwise and b) help them find like minded co-founders and industry mentors. The org complements and collabs with USC's three entrepreneurship orgs - SEP, Troy Labs, and LavaLab - who otherwise compete vigorously with one another and do not coordinate.

Role: Faculty lead

I was the inaugural Governor / Board Director for the Interactive Media Peer Group within the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Primetime Emmys). I led development of and achieved approval for the Emmy for Excellence in Interactive Television.

Role: Board of Directors

Created this early mass audience game platform with funding from Microsoft. The pitch for the game was that, contrary to contemporary popular belief, the audience for games was much bigger than young men. It started out as this short proposal and evolved into a platform of games. NetWits ran practice rounds 23 hours a day and held one broadcast-like, event nightly. We gave away prizes during the live event - roundtrip plane tickets courtesy of our sponsor, Expedia. The game is helped pioneer the space of social games and games for broader audiences. NetWits was awarded "Top Ten of the Web" by Time Magazine (1996). This was a truly amazing team of programmers and designers - see pic 1, pic 2, pic 3.

Role: Creator, team lead

The Redistricting Game, was an early "serious game" to teach the effects of congressional reapportionment (aka redistricting) on the US democracy.  It received support / endorsement from League of Women Voters, The Center for Excellence in Government, FairVote, and other non-partisan orgs. The game accurately simulated the redistricting process and allowed the player to experience 1) Drawing the map to meet party objectives, 2) Getting feedback from partisan politicians (your bosses), and 3) Submitting for Approval - e.g. usher the map through three branches of government: a vote by the state legislature, the Governor signature and, the courts. The Redistricting Game was officially launched in June 2007 in the U.S. Capitol Building with Representative John Tanner and ex-Senator John Anderson, both proponents of redistricting reform. As far as we know this is the first digital game to be launched in the halls of the US Congress. The game won multiple awards and generated tremendous press including in NYTimes, CNN, Wired, NPR, Washington Post and many other publications.

Role: Team lead, game designer

This was the convergence companion app to Ken Burns' documentary, Frank Lloyd Wright. It was funded by Intel to demonstrate the power of the Pentium II processor - e.g. so people could see why they should upgrade their computers. The project included un-before seen immersive photo technology to allow the user to take a tour of three of Wright's most famous buildings - e.g. like in this screenshot. It allowed interested viewers to explore Wright's work in more detail via additional text, images, and video. The project won numerous awards including a Gold INVISION.

Role: Producer

This ambitious project combined a social network, Facebook, with an episodic television show. Turner Network Television funded the pilot. The hero, Jessica Irish, had the superpower that she could tap an army of online followers (the players) to find information, thwart bad guys, and generally do things no mere mortal mystery solver could do. This project had so much potential and such an amazing team but was ultimately too much of a stretch for TV execs to get their heads around. This project taught very hard lessons about trying to innovate in cultures that are not set up to innovate. Lesson: build skunkworks.  

Role: Creator, team lead, designer

The success of NetWits helped us win the project to bring Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! online for Sony. These were early mass audience multiplayer games and garnered many millions of players. The back end server was state of the art technology built for then-unprecedented scale. We got to re-imagine the aesthetic for both games but had to do it with the tiniest file size imaginable. Check out this early UI sketch by the amazing Vincent Lacava,

Role: Team lead

I'd like to think that multiplayer Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! helped pave the way for a new wave of social mechanics in online games.

Role: Team lead 

MTV's webRIOT was a pioneering participatory television show. Host, Ahmet Zappa asked questions about music videos and the audience answered them in sync with the broadcast. The names of the top players popped up live on MTV during each broadcast. The project required development of a new kind of game server technology that synced game events to the timecode from the television broadcast center. We built a technology platform company, Spiderdance, and produced sync-to-broadcast shows with many television networks including NBC (Weakest Link), Turner, A&E, and others. Watch this full episode of webRIOT to see how it worked. See all of the sync-to-broadcasts products in this Spiderdance Promo video.

Role: VP, Programming - Spiderdance, Inc. 

This is a multiplayer word making game funded by Microsoft. Players walk around as letters of the alphabet and have to socialize and cooperate with other letters to form into words. Longer words with low utility letters (like X) score more points. Each time you score a word you spawn as a new letter. This screenshot captures the cooperative nature of the experience. This game is hilarious to play but Microsoft ended up not launching it due to change in Microsoft Network strategy. I am surprised that a game with this mechanic has not appeared somewhere.

Role: Team lead, game designer

This was a pioneering virtual museum project to allow people to experience art via immersive technology. Our team took super hi res photos of Van Gogh paintings while they were in the U.S. National Gallery of Art. Users could wander the gallery and then zoom into paintings. We used an exotic technology to let users zoom between many layers of these photos to get up very close to the brush strokes (not shown). This was another project funded by Intel to a) demonstrate the power of the Pentium II and b) distribute new technology via the internet.

Role: Team lead  

This was a project created in one of my game design classes at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. It was a collaboration with the Sims team at Electronic Arts. EA flew the entire class to Redwood City and trained everyone on the Sims 2 highly proprietary editing tool. We had special security for the team to use the EA software in a university lab. The students created their own Sims 2 Expansion Pack called Spooked! It included 30 paranormal objects/characters for Sims to engage with. Objects/characters included a Possessed Toilet, Ghost Maid, an interactive Portrait of Dorian Gray, Frank (a larger-than-life prankster with an uncanny resemblance to EA exec Bing Gordon), and many others. A large number of these students were hired by the Sims team. See collab pic.

Role: Faculty lead

I was a founding member of the premiere design firm R/GA Interactive in NYC. We grew R/GA from 4-300+ people and $0 - >$50mm in revenue during my time there. We produced hundreds of interactive projects and won dozens of awards. We built a reputation at the place where companies could go when they needed head-turning, out-of-the box technology + design. Some of those projects appear on this page. We built projects and initiatives for a long list of collaborators/clients including: Intel, Microsoft, Disney, AT&T, IBM, Kodak, Sony, Warner Brothers, Mattel, Compaq, NASDAQ, many others. One of the roles I took on was to develop design process and methods that would allow the company to consistently deliver top quality work while scaling in size via early career (e.g. low cost) talent recruited from universities. I enjoyed recruiting, training, and leading talented young people. This influenced my decision to become a professor. A lot of what/how we teach at IYA evolved from the trial-by-fire that was R/GA.

Role: Founding member, team lead, designer

Ecotopia was an online social game about saving the planet. Players started with a dirty, non‐sustainable world and transformed it into a satisfying green utopia one house and one business at a time. When players collectively completed in-game challenges we rewarded them by planting real trees in the real Brazilian rainforest. We planted tens of thousands of trees and generated revenue while doing it because the cost to plant the trees was lower than the revenue we generated by selling players resource packs. Separately, players could upload pictures of themselves doing Green Act Challenges (like composting, car pooling, installing solar panels, etc.) and earn rewards in the game. We were figuring out how to convert virtual actions into real world impact. The game became a scorecard/trophy case for people to show off their commitment to being green. Ecotopia was created with help from Harrison Ford (press pic) and Conservation International. See screenshots and more info in this PDF.

Role: Company founder/CEO, creator, game designer

This site allowed users to create their own Web pages and populate them interactive "stickers". The stickers were social gizmos, games, polls, puzzles, and expressive graphics. New stickers were released regularly and an economy emerged.  The site drove incredible engagement and viral growth (at a time when we didn't have standards for tracking such things). In retrospect, Stickerworld was an early social network which demonstrated people's appetites for self expression and online communication - pre-Geocities, pre-MySpace. The site was created for Children's Television Workshop in NYC and their amazing leader, Tina Sharkey (who is now my faculty colleague at IYA).

Role: Exec producer

This is an attraction inside the Space Pavilion at Disney's EPCOT Center. It is a location-based multiplayer game for sixty players. The players are divided into two teams. Each player/team member stands at a touch screen console and solves puzzles that have a mission control theme.  Each time they solve a puzzle resources pop up on their team captain's console and he/she can use those resources to propel their space ship (which appears on a big screen that the whole room can see). At the end of the session one of the teams wins (see video). Fun facts:
a) the victory animation - that appears on the big screen - includes one easter egg frame which goes by so fast that the players can't see it. By some miracle this photo captures the exact 1/30th of a second time window when the easter egg frame was on the screen.
b) we got to work with NASA as "research" for what mission control operators do and were invited to visit the Space Shuttle in its hangar, talk to astronauts, and attend a shuttle launch.

Role: game designer (not team lead)  

Co-authored this book about game design while a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (game program) and co-director of the EA Game Innovation Lab. The book blurb on Amazon reads: "As experienced teachers of novice game designers, the authors have discovered patterns in the way that students grasp game design - the mistakes they make as well as the methods to help them to create better games.  Each exercise requires no background in programming or artwork, releasing beginning designers from the intricacies of electronic game production and allowing them to learn what works and what doesn't work in a game system. Additionally, these exercises teach important skills in system design: the processes of prototyping, playtesting, and redesigning."

The book has become a leading textbook on game design and is used in colleges around the world.

Role: Co-author (version 1 only) 

Streamline was an early e-commerce / grocery delivery service based in Boston. I worked on the digital application and we had funding from Intel as another project to show off the power of the Pentium II processor. Since the internet was slow we loaded all of the UI and all inventory imagery to the user's hard drive. That made the site perform very quickly. The ideas in the application are now standard in e-commerce sites and grocery delivery  services like Instacart and Amazon Fresh but we had invent everything from scratch to get the service working.

Role: Team lead (front end application)  

This was another early e-commerce site - e.g. promoting performances and selling tickets online. We couldn't just plug in a pre-made shopping cart or Stripe for payments and so had to figure all of those things out from scratch.

Role: Exec producer

This was an interactive documentary about the history of military aviation. It was produced for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We got to work with the history department at the US Air Force Academy through which we got access to literally all early aviation footage that exists (plus tons of old aviation design files, etc.) That was a great experience.  The project was made at a time when integrating video into an application was exotic (see video).

Role: Producer, designer

With James Earl Jones as narrator this interactive title spans Europe and the Americas from the early Renaissance to the 20th Century from five different cultural perspectives -- White/European, Black/African, Hispanic/Latino, Asian and Native American. The largest multimedia project ever made, "Columbus" is on permanent display at the Library of Congress, National Demonstration Laboratories for new media and technology. Using an IBM CDROM drive, a Pioneer LaserDisc Player and an advanced concept engine, "Columbus" connects 4400 scenes, 3500 concepts, 5 hours of video, 180 hours of self-navigable imagery and over 900,000 soft links on 3 videodiscs and 1 computer optical disc. It runs on an IBM PS/2 computer that IBM sold as a package to school districts for use in history instruction.

Role: Producer