Incentives are a powerful and popular way in business to achieve ones business goals, be it in HR (performance-based salary components), in operations or projects (bonuses for on-time delivery), in logistics (penalties for delays), Marketing (loyalty cards) and many other areas. Principal-agent theory, game theory, mechanism design are just some of the established research areas in business and economics which deal with incentives.
While incentives are well established in the business world, it seems, that games are not. Games are incentive systems, too, but the image of not being serious business has unfortunately prevented us from applying the powerful and popular incentive mechanism of gaming to the business world.
In a recent blog post on gigaom one can learn about how games and game concepts are starting to spill over into other areas of everyday life and work. Read this post if you want to have a look into the future of the work place where healthy game concepts could help boost performance as well as job satisfaction among workers!
Prediction Markets are but one way of introducing incentives in the work place. The success of Prediction Markets demonstrates how the right incentive structure can easily and quickly yield large benefits.
Incentives in the work place are coming and they are coming to stay with more and more graduates being brought up in a culture of gaming this culture will become more and more accepted and even expected at the work place of the future … and even of today ….
