What is Gamification?

Gamification is more than just a buzzword these days as more and more non-gaming businesses have started to adopt it. It is a billion-dollar industry that drives positive emotions in people who desire to achieve and be rewarded.

Highlighting the above, coupling human behaviour with gaming will bring a positive change to an organisation.

How does it work for Marketing and HR?

Gamification is being used by companies from almost every industry. Companies such as Nike and Starbucks put in strategic marketing and gaming programmes to enhance engagement, loyalty and sales.

Human resources also find these tools useful with many case studies of gamification addressing engagement levels, talent attraction and retention. Here, at InnoWave, InnoPoints is the program developed to increase employee satisfaction and reinforce the company as one of the best places to work.

Can it work in Education?

There are many corporate training programs which have been largely successful, like the one Deloitte implemented – Deloitte Leadership Academy (DLA), with increasing levels of participation and engagement.

Education is, however, one of the industries which most successful when implementing gamification learning techniques. It encourages longer focus from students and environments where pupils are motivated to experiment as they learn to solve problems.

New York City-based Institute of Play with Quest to Learn, a fully gamified school, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, that gamified a master’s level course on cloud computing, are just two examples of this.

Could the Government use this to engage people?

The scope of gamification does not end within companies, brands, schools and universities. The increased focus on citizen engagement and the possibilities provided by a digital society make gamification a powerful tool for citizenship: it can change behaviours for better.

It will give the government an effective means to involve people to reach goals that otherwise might take too long or even remain as unmet. Putting gamification in the mix with rewards will encourage people to be more actively involved in their neighbourhood, making things such as recycling correctly rewarding.

CityPoints, implemented in Cascais – a coastal village near the Portuguese capital – is a case study of a city gamified program that encourages and rewards sustainable behaviour, inducing participants to take an active role in transforming their own community into a better place to live.

The program is based on a mobile app that allows people to perform a list of pre-defined activities in areas such as environment, social responsibility and green mobility. They can collect points that they exchange for online vouchers to use in a network of local partners, including museums, events and sports free entrances and discounts in services and products. The app also allows the sharing of points and vouchers with other users, increasing interaction and collaboration.

Awarded at the World Summit 2017, CityPoints is just one of the ways InnoWave can empower city councils, government organisations, companies, brands and universities. And we do it by using artificial intelligence, smart and simple interactions and cloud platform, with complete tailor-made solutions, fully integrated with client platforms.

We believe gamification is changing behaviours for the better. That is why, at InnoWave, we created InnGage solutions, enabling your business to stand out from the crowd.