What Actually Gets Funded Inside Organisations, and Why?

Most ideas don’t fail because they’re bad.

They don’t make the cut because they don’t survive judgement, constraints, and the all-important funding logic. That uncomfortable truth is what drew me to BossUp!, an innovation pitching and funding game designed by Chemistry.

BossUp! is not a creativity free-for-all. It’s a simulation of something far more familiar, and often far more frustrating: how ideas actually gain traction inside organisations.

This post is a reflection on what the game models, how it works, and where it becomes genuinely useful beyond the table.

BossUp! as a simulation, not a game.

At its core, BossUp! is an innovation pitching and funding simulation.

It models:
• decision-making under pressure
• subjective judgement
• organisational constraints
• and limited, unevenly distributed funding

In other words, it focuses less on idea generation and more on idea survival.

That distinction matters.

Many tools help teams come up with ideas. Very few help teams explore why certain ideas get approved, supported, or quietly shelved. BossUp! operates precisely in that gap. 

Three card types, three organisational forces

What makes the game work is the interaction between three simple components.

1. Challenge Cards, organisational pressure

The Challenge Cards represent the real problems organisations face: regulatory shifts, internal disruption, competitive threats, or strategic blind spots.

Some are serious. Some are playful. What matters is how teams interpret them once they are in play.

They anchor the round in a shared reality.

2. Trigger Cards, framing and constraint

Trigger Cards introduce the lens through which the challenge must be addressed.

These are not prompts for blue-sky thinking. They are constraints: technologies, approaches, mindsets, or external forces that shape how the solution must be pitched.

A trigger doesn’t just inspire an idea. It forces a point of view.

3. Funding Cards, power and scarcity

Funding Cards are where the simulation sharpens.

Each player has their own funding stack. Funding is:
• limited
• personal
• partially random
• and revealed only at the end

This mirrors how funding decisions often feel in real organisations: opaque, constrained, and influenced by more than just logic.

Together, Challenge, Trigger, and Funding cards simulate the real forces that decide whether an idea gains traction, gets funded, or quietly dies in the corner. 

How the gameplay works, in practice

A round of BossUp! is deliberately simple.

One player becomes the Innovation Director and selects a challenge for the round.
The remaining players choose a Trigger Card from their hand and develop a pitch that solves the challenge through that specific lens.

Each player pitches their idea. The Innovation Director listens and chooses a winner.

Then comes the most interesting part.

Everyone except the winning player secretly funds the idea using their own Funding Cards. Each funder draws two cards at random and chooses how much to invest. Those funding decisions remain hidden.

The winner keeps the Challenge Card, the Trigger Card, and the funding, but only finds out how much support they received at the end of the game. 

This separation between visible judgement and hidden funding creates the core tension of the game.

Where the tension really comes from

BossUp! works because it mirrors a familiar organisational ambiguity.

Judgement is public. Funding is private.
Ideas are praised openly, but supported unevenly.
Decisions are justified after the fact.

You are not just pitching an idea. You are pitching an idea that must survive:
• subjective judgement
• limited resources
• and competing interests

That tension is what makes the game uncomfortable, and useful. 

What BossUp! reveals about teams

After a few rounds, patterns start to emerge.
• Who consistently wins pitches?
• Who gets funded heavily but rarely judged best?
• Who plays safe, and who takes risks?
• Whose ideas sound compelling, but attract little investment?

These patterns often say more about team dynamics, power structures, and decision-making culture than about idea quality itself.

Confidence, framing, and timing frequently outperform raw idea strength. BossUp! doesn’t hide that. It exposes it.

Where I would use this tool

BossUp! can be used lightly, but it shines when used intentionally.

Some practical applications:
• as a post-mortem after real pitch cycles
• with leadership or innovation teams to surface decision biases
• as a fast diagnostic of how ideas are evaluated internally
• as a conversation starter around what “good ideas” really mean in a specific organisation

With light facilitation, the real value comes from the debrief, especially around funding patterns rather than just winners. 

A final thought

BossUp! doesn’t teach innovation.

It reveals how innovation survives.

And that makes it an uncomfortable but valuable mirror for any organisation that claims to value new ideas.

So I’ll leave you with the same question I opened with:

What actually gets funded in your organisation, and why?