Playground for entrepreneurs
What is an entrepreneur? An entrepreneur is someone with their own business. Sounds easy, but can sometimes be quite a quest. Not only for start-ups just shaping their business, but also for entrepreneurs who have been working on a business for some time and are thinking about expanding or changing direction.
Of course, as a self-employed person, you can think about this on your own for a very long time. If you do it with fellow entrepreneurs, you can gain much more: you learn from experiences and ideas that other entrepreneurs present to you. That provides a huge mountain of inspiration from which you can extract the most important things at will.
Inge De Dreu is owner of Playground for Entrepreneurs. She recently organised a morning for entrepreneurs together with Laxman Murragapan of Lego Serious Games. I was there! We played with lego that morning as well as playing the board game Inge made for the playground.


Storytelling with construction
That morning in Oss, I met entrepreneurs from very different backgrounds: both start-ups and entrepreneurs with years of experience from education to business. We started the morning with an assignment Legio Serious Play: build a tower with the bricks you get. The music went on and we got to work. For me, it had been a while since I had built freely with Lego bricks, without a manual. What a freedom!
Our first construction job was followed by a second one with a few new bricks. We also had to tell something about ourselves with this new build. I had never done anything with Lego Serious Play before, but I noticed that it really releases creativity. Telling something about yourself or building something that tells you about yourself is something completely different. Nice start to the day!


Unexpected questions
After this warm-up, we focused on the board game from Playground for Entrepreneurs. Inge created this game so that participants can work on their businesses in a safe environment.
This game allows you to share your challenge, learn from each other and work on your (business) development.
The game board is divided into four squares on which there is a selection of cards. As the starting player, I have the honour of throwing the die first. You read all the cards with the same number as the die. Then you choose a card, read it out loud and tell in 2 minutes what it has to do with you. For me, the question: which brand in another industry has an image that you would also like for your company?
A question I don’t have a ready answer to. I therefore told my story in the group, stuttering a bit. Because the group was then given 1 minute to share their feedback and/or thoughts on the question, it ultimately gave me valuable input. It is now a question I still think about from time to time when I get excited about a brand or product myself.
The game board with dice and cards acts as a guide for conversation and exchange between the players. It made it a pleasant exchange, as the cards sometimes raised unexpected and surprising questions. The feedback from fellow players, from different industries and with different years of experience, provided refreshing input.
With the game Playground for Entrepreneurs, Inge de Dreu is pursuing a number of goals. The game:
- Empowers entrepreneurs: the game helps you review and enrich market insights and teaches you to navigate the entrepreneurial journey.
- Promotes resilience: because the game focuses on adapting strategy and the ‘search’ that characterises the early stages of entrepreneurship, it helps budding entrepreneurs face those challenges.
- Encourages resourcefulness: entrepreneurship requires a lot of ‘figuring out’. Through the game, entrepreneurs exchange information and can benefit from and build on collective knowledge.
- Promotes collaboration among colleagues: the game fosters an environment where entrepreneurs learn to support each other.
Not surprisingly, Playground for Entrepreneurs is now being used at various courses. Not only in the Netherlands, but also in Europe and South America.
Curious about the game? Read more here. Or contact Inge De Dreu directly.

