Game on for innovation

By 2015, more than 50% of organisations worldwide will implement some form of game mechanics to drive innovation and employee motivation, according to Gartner.

The research firm, in its latest enterprise architecture report, predicts that by 2014, a 'gamified' service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon.

Gartner says more than 70% of Global 2 000 organisations will have at least one 'gamified' application.

Gamification refers to employing game mechanics to non-game environments, such as business innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change.

The research firm explains that gamification provides goals and well-defined rules of play, and empowers people to achieve the goals in order to boost productivity.

According to Gartner analyst, Brian Burke, the goals of gamification are to achieve higher levels of employee and customer engagement, change behaviours and stimulate innovation.

“Where games traditionally model the real world, organisations must now take the opportunity for their real world to emulate games,” notes Burke.

The use of game mechanics in non-entertainment applications has been happening for quite a long time, particularly in customer-loyalty applications.

“We are in the early stages of this trend and I think the greatest successes are yet to be seen, but the current sweet spot for 'gamified' applications is marketing and customer loyalty. Using game mechanics to create deeper levels of engagement with customers and potential customers is clearly the focus for the majority of businesses.

“But we also see organisations having tremendous success leveraging gamification in innovation management and education, and some early examples of using gamification in employee performance management,” he says.

Burke also points out that the use of leader boards, levels, points and badges are some examples of how games can motivate players through status and recognition of performance. He says social networks are influencing the spread of gamification.

For instance, some airlines offer frequent flyer badges on geo-location social network Foursquare. “Some 'gamified' applications such as Foursquare are linked to social networking platforms like Facebook but not yet truly integrated,” adds Burke.

“I would expect many more gamified applications to leverage social networking platforms that are already in place to increase engagement through status and recognition on the social networking platform rather than within the gamified application environment,” he notes.

The UK Department for Work and Pensions created an innovation game called Idea Street to decentralise innovation and generate ideas from 120 000 people across the organisation.

Within the first 18 months, Idea Street had approximately 4 500 users and had generated 1 400 ideas, 63 of which had gone forward to implementation.

Further examples include the US military's 'America's Army' video game recruiting tool, and the World Bank-sponsored Evoke game which crowd-sources ideas from players globally to solve social challenges.