In a recently report Gartner state that games will be used to drive innovations, an old phenomenon but interesting. One of the most interesting stories is about how LEGO made an amazing turnaround some years back, and in the new spirit started to invited their customers to design and customize their own LEGO via Internet. And not just that, they also released a complete new highly interactive and flexible platform Mindstorm encouraging customers to design and develop their own LEGO-robots. Talk about innovative leap: strengthened relationship, better understanding and customer insights as well as a renewed hype around their products. Just have a look at the clip I found on YouTube.
Today, it seems like many companies and organizations actually try to use internet based games, as an open innovation approach, gaining better understanding of behavior and demand. Another example on how games can be used to get better insights and ideas is how the UK Department of Labor launched a game-like application called “Idea Street” aiming at collect new insights from their 120 000 users. Read more here.
