Gamification of Creativity: Exploring the Usefulness of Serious Games for Ideation

Organizing for idea generation is a recurring challenge in intensive innovation contexts. The literature on ideation has reached a compelling consensus on the features that such organizational devices must possess to support sufficient creativity: learning processes and a creative climate of confidence to promote collaboration. However, current practical methodologies struggle to simultaneously realize these two features. In this paper, we explore the potential of Serious Games, a collaborative tool that has been used since the 1960s to facilitate learning processes through the simulation of reality and a role-playing game, to induce an immersive experience and, more recently, to support the ideation process. To do so, we conducted an exploratory case study using a Serious Game to support ideation in a French medium-sized business. We then assess the strengths and areas for improvement of this Serious Game with respect to an ideation performance framework based on the existing literature. Our findings show that Serious Games are efficient tools for supporting existing knowledge exchange between participants and collaboration by providing a creative climate, but they may not sufficiently support learning of the external knowledge required to attain high levels of originality. Accordingly, we discuss some crucial parameters to be further explored to allow for the effective managerial use of such methodologies, such as the fine-tuning of the knowledge content that serves as a basis for the game.