Gartner's 2011 gamification forecast: gamified innovation by 2015

Gartner issued the forecast from Egham, UK, on April 12, 2011. It had three parts. By 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes would gamify those processes. By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention would become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon. And more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations would have at least one gamified application by 2014.

Analyst Brian Burke defined gamification as the use of game mechanics in non-game settings such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change. He told enterprise architects, chief information officers and IT planners to lead the trend, and to try at least one gaming exercise in their planning that year.

Gartner pointed to three examples. The UK Department for Work and Pensions created Idea Street, a social collaboration platform with points, leader boards and a buzz index, to draw ideas from its 120,000 people. In its first 18 months it had about 4,500 users and 1,400 ideas, and 63 of those ideas went forward to implementation. The other two were the US military's America's Army recruiting game and Evoke, a World Bank-sponsored game that crowdsources ideas from players worldwide for social challenges.

The release named four ways gamification drives engagement. It speeds up feedback loops that are slow in the real world, such as annual appraisals. It gives clear goals and rules of play. It builds a narrative around activities that are rarely compelling by themselves. And it breaks large, long-term challenges into short tasks that are hard but achievable.

Both forecast years, 2014 and 2015, are past. Gartner presented the topic at its Enterprise Architecture Summit 2011 in London on May 9-10 and in San Diego on June 22-23, in a keynote called Architecting Fun: How Gamification Is Changing the Enterprise. The London summit met at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, the San Diego one at the Manchester Grand Hyatt.

Burke put the shift in one sentence: games have traditionally modeled the real world, and organizations should now let their real world imitate games. The report concluded that gamification in marketing and customer retention programs would matter as much as online services like Facebook, eBay and Amazon.