Gamification for Organizational Change and Innovation

Background

Generating innovative ideas and iterating through them via a collective exercise in an open dialogue format is part of the general trend from closed narrow-sourced innovation to open innovation, which taps into communities outside individual departments or entire organizations. Methods such as workshops, skunkworks, focus groups or specialized R&D methods that require physical collocation and extensive resources are being replaced or augmented by online ideation management technologies (Dombrowski et al, 2007). These allow organizations to transition from potentially expensive discrete events and standalone contests to more cost-effective and ongoing competitions for stakeholders to provide suggestions on process and product improvement. However, engagement in mass innovation initiatives has been traditionally seen as problematic (Totterdill et al., 2016; Tidd & Bessant, 2005) for reasons spanning from inertia, a lack of desire to perform beyond one’s job description, to skepticism about how ideas and feedback are ultimately handled by organizational management.