BusinessWeek: World of Warcraft trains innovators

As it turns out World of Warcraft may be training a new generation of business leaders. Businessweek gets it on multiplayer games:

What we know today is becoming less valuable as we struggle with the challenge of innovating faster and learning faster to operate more effectively in these challenging times.

Mention learning to senior executives, and they tend to default immediately to training programs. Here's the problem: Training programs are effective only at transferring what we already know to others. How do we create powerful platforms jointly to innovate and develop new knowledge that no one had before?

The authors cited other ways in which the gaming battlefield institutionalizes innovative behavior, for example, by making quick experimentation possible, progressively raising the achievement bar, offering "clear and rich" assessment metrics and, most importantly, creating an environment that rewards "new dispositions" or the new knowledge that changes the game.

Wayne

innovation, games

Comments

[warcraft gold]

This is awesome. World of Warcraft to be used as a tool in real life. WoW is a good basis since you get to interact with tons of players at the same time.

[Obie]

World of Warcraft has been used as a dynamic tool in the past for other social experiments. There once was a study done to show the spread of a communicable viruses.

The amount of players and straight humanity that exists in one location makes the game ripe for experimentation.