• The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Monday, February 26, 2007 11:30 AM

At Hasbro's game division in East Longfellow, Mass., game designers, marketing managers and other employees gather every Friday to play board games. Some -- like Scrabble and Clue -- were invented decades ago. Others play games sold by competitors, or, they enjoy their own defunct childhood favorites.

These lunch-time games are part of Hasbro's efforts to find ways to update classics and create new games. "We have an unbelievable heritage with our brands, but we have to keep them relevant to customers" to compete against videogames and other pop culture, says Philip Jackson, who took charge of the games division as group executive last February.

To spur innovation, Hasbro managers keep in touch with a global network of game inventors, do online surveys of customers and observe thousands of children and adults playing games developed in a new lab called GameWorks. They also talk with prospective customers about how they want to spend leisure time.

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