Yaniv Corem, Serious Games & Gamification Lead, IBM Research - Haifa
Categories
  • Future of Work
  • Next Generation Customer Experience
The Project

My team and I created Games for Crowds, a crowdsourcing gaming platform that allows employees to play, create, and share games that leverage the collective intelligence of the organization to solve difficult problems. Our solution has helped clients, both internally and externally, build business glossaries, organizational hierarchies, and even brainstorm ideas through mini-innovation jams.

The Technology

Games for Crowds, a research project developed by the Social Technologies group at IBM Research in Haifa

Metrics Matter

Before my project: People would waste weeks, even months, looking for answers to problems they were struggling with like finding SMEs or BI on a certain product / company.

After my project: People could use Games for Crowds to create a game around their problem and get answers from the crowd. We've used a game to create an ad-hoc social graph that was better than the one created by the organization itself, because (a) the data was up-to-date, and (b) it was generated in a bottom-up fashion by players.

Disruptive Factor

Our crowdsourcing games forced my managers to think about how the collective intelligence of employees could be leveraged to drive company business. We showed that human computation can be as good, if not better, than sophisticated algorithms and that as humans we have innate capabilities that computers still don't possess. Our solution made employees feel more connected to the company by getting everyone to work toward a common goal.

Shining Moment

We often partner with clients to create custom games for different events. The games we create are kind of like a mini-innovation jam where all the participants play together to brainstorm ideas for certain problems posed by the organizers of the event. Players usually get 10 minutes to answer 10 open-ended questions. It is amazing to see how excited people get and to experience this rush of adrenaline as people start pouring everything they can think of into the game. What is more satisfying is seeing their faces as we present the results of the game on a big screen. They are blown away by what they've accomplished together in such a short amount of time!