Gartner Report suggests Innovating through Game Creation

Do honestly think that in just a few years, more than half of organizations that manage innovation processes will do so by creating games for their employees and clients to "play"? Gartner Research does (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1629214), and further, they believe that 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.

A quote from Gartner's article (4/12):

"Gamification describes the broad trend of employing game mechanics to non-game environments such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change," said Brian Burke, an analyst at Gartner. "Enterprise architects, CIOs and IT planners must be aware of, and lead, the business trend of gamification, educate their business counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization."


The article explains the U.K.'s Department for Work and Pensions innovation game called "Idea Street" intended to make innovation a social event, eliciting productivity from its 120,000 people across the organization.

Any company needing to engage its knowledge workers (that's everybody, in my opinion, because every employee is knowledgeable about at least one unique thing critical to the organization), effect change from within or otherwise innovate should consider the goals of gamification from those organizations already making progress:

1. Accelerated feedback cycles
2. Clear goals and rules of play
3. A compelling narrative for engagement
4. Tasks that are challenging, yet achievable

Getting past the idea that games have no place in a serious workplace will likely take slightly less time than its predecessor argument, "Why would I ever use email for work?" [ Hint: Anyone who doesn't even remember not having an email address can replace the word "email" with "LinkedIn," "FaceBook," or "Twitter" in that example. In the mean time, I'll go back to realizing how old I am].

While the last thing I want is my work email to look like "Farmville," I am excited to see what types of application a focused gamification strategy can have on an organizations ability to share knowledge and give innovation a greater voice from within.