Gamification for Innovators and Entrepreneurs

This book introduces an exciting, still nascent superpower: One that enables a person to use, repurpose and create games that will help solve the great societal and organisational challenges companies, startups and public institutions are dealing with - games that actually drive innovation, engage stakeholders and facilitate experimentation. We empower innovators and entrepreneurs by building on insights gathered in the gamification of innovation at leading European firms and leveraging knowledge from over 150 experts in the fields of gamification and innovation management. We are introducing a design approach that enables everyone concerned with innovation to create their own games based on state of the art of academic and practitioner knowledge. We hope this approach will convey a new understanding of games and gamification and provide the means to put it into practise. Several easily customizable games and gamified interaction formats, collections of patterns, and educational materials for training and coaching should help you to do so.

Part I introduces the power of games to drive innovation and tackle grand challenges. It also provides the conceptual foundations on games and gamification, learning and innovation management. Part II introduces a pattern approach to configuring, creating games and using games to drive innovation. Part III demonstrates the approach and presents different games that have been developed to solve innovation challenges in leading European firms - each of these formats is available online and can be adapted for different organisations. The final part IV derives lessons learned from the development of these games and the pattern collection to train innovation professionals or to teach students how to create their own games addressing specific challenges. It ends with an outlook into the future of games and gamification, and provides some starting points for your own future with games.

Chapter 1 / Challenges: Gamification and games to tackle grand challenges Over the last two decades, play, games and gamification have become established as new ways to increase the efficiency or productivity of the workforce, foster engagement and competition, and improve business performance in well-defined task domains. Think of a restaurant chain whose employees are rewarded points for selling the new kitchen specials, the top-notch servers not just being shown at the top of a leader board, but also receiving messages from management acknowledging their contribution to the company's success.

Several companies, innovation consultants and entrepreneurs, as well as higher education institutions have embraced gamification and use serious games to boost performance. Some have also used games to drive exploration and innovation and to master the great transformations ahead of us. A few are using gamified interaction formats and games to drive qualitative change and engage participants in collaborative, co-creative, action-oriented and experience-based learning activities. However, documentation of these formats is scarce and inconsistent, and design guidelines and patterns, as well as educational materials for professional trainers and teachers are lacking.

To tackle this gap, we talked to game developers, innovation managers and experts in the field to learn from their experiences. We reviewed all the cases we could find in the scientific literature as well as online and in white papers. We developed a design pattern approach to collect, consolidate and advance existing knowledge and organisational capabilities in games and gamification that drive innovation and entrepreneurship. And this approach allows you to create new training programmes, educational materials and curricula in which innovation professionals and students use and customize games for new purposes, but also are able to create new forms of gamification from scratch. These games introduce a safe space for experiential learning, experimentation in small groups, and trying out new forms of (inclusive) collaboration. As we will see, they even provide a still widely unexplored means to address the great business and societal challenges we are facing today.

The power of games to tackle grand challenges New grand challenges ahead of us require new methods if we are to successfully deal with them and find yet unforeseen solutions. We should note here that in this book gamification does not mean motivating people to do things they wouldn't otherwise want to do, but creating formats of social interaction that boost the capacities of players to drive innovation or start a new business. Gamification is about this search for and iterative development of tailored (to a challenge), yet unconventional methods to drive innovation, explore and pave entrepreneurial paths, and facilitate learning along the way in an action-oriented and engaging manner.

Games introduce a safe space for experimentation in small groups and for trying and establishing unconventional forms of (inclusive) collaboration.

They are a powerful approach to address the great business and societal challenges we are facing today, because they can be purposefully designed and iteratively improved to do so. We briefly discuss the potential of each of these three aspects and then go into the innovation and entrepreneurship challenges that games are best suited to dealing with.