Innovation and gamification in the public sector

Purpose and goal

To develop a tool that through game mechanics facilitates the innovation process. The goal was to produce a board game that could engage players of various experience and expert knowledge to work together on finding out true customer needs and ideas to fulfil the needs. The purpose is to increase collaborator-driven innovation within the public sector and to raise awareness for what innovation governed by requirements really means.

Expected results and effects

We expected that the game would be engaging. Our hypothesis was that the participants would show signs of empathy towards the personas and that their ability to take on multiple perspectives would increase. What we observed during the test phase exceeded our expectations by far. Most challenging for the players were the idea generation phase. It was hard to come up with ideas that were new in context. They often generated ideas that were variations of already existing solutions. We have suggestions for changes in the game mechanics that can improve the height and elasticity of the ideas.

Planned approach and implementation

The project started with an onsite visit to Norsjö where we held meetings with a wide variety of both municipal, private and non-profit organizations. We described the project and asked all to describe their place of work and how suggestions of improvement had been handled by management. Our next phase consisted of creating hypotheses and initial prototypes to find a game mechanic that would support our analysis. We also had work meetings with scientists tied to the project. The lab was concluded with a user testing consisting of four different groups in Norsjö.