As the umbrella concept that broadly refers to “technological, economic, cultural, and societal developments in which reality is becoming more gameful” (Hamari, 2019), gamification has the potential to strengthen the activities of businesses of all scales across different industries worldwide. Research (Wünderlich et al., 2020; Feng et al., 2020; Riar et al., 2021) has shown that gamification can be applied for purposes that range from onboarding new employees or boosting effectiveness at work, to becoming a business model and a service offer.
Answering the questions: what are the highlights and hurdles of implementing gamification as a startup? The GamiFIN 2022 Practitioners Panel presents an opportunity to learn about the experiences and expectations of SMEs regarding gamification and playful approaches to drive our everyday lives forward, potentially making them more sustainable.
Featuring CEOs from rising SMEs and the Finnish Innovation Fund, this panel is an invitation for gamification scholars to question the impact that their work has and could have to support the endeavors of small and medium enterprises; it is a challenge to think beyond our research work and act together towards discovering new research avenues and evidence on how gamification can strengthen or hinder the efforts of SMEs.
We invite you to meet our distinguished panelists and join the discussion online on April 26th at 15:00 EEST.
Check out our participating panelists!
Attila Szantner, CEO and Co-founder,
MMOS (Massively Multiplayer Online Science)
As CEO and Co-founder of MMOS (“Massively Multiplayer Online Science”), Attila Szantner built several successful award-winning collaborations between major research institutions and AAA game developers. These citizen science games, EVE Online’s “Project Discovery” and “Borderlands Science”in Borderlands 3 engaged over 4 million players and yielded over half a billion player contributions. With these achievements they became one of the most impactful citizen science projects and one of the biggest science engagement and communication efforts of recent years.
Markus Terho, Project Director,
Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra
Markus Terho is a corporate responsibility veteran, with over two decades in the industry. He has held several notable positions, among them, he has served as the global sustainability chief at Nokia. There he has managed global corporate responsibility activities, environmental and social responsibility, social investment portfolios as well as disaster relief and charity donations. In his current role, he leads the Sustainable Everyday Life program, that promotes the change towards a more sustainable life in two ways: by inspiring individuals to make sustainable choices in their everyday life and by helping companies develop competitive sustainable products and services.
Silja Litvin, CEO Founder,
PsycApps
Techstars Berlin 2019 Alumni Silja Litvin, CEO and founder of PsycApps, Ph.D. candidate at Ludwig Maximilian University and honorary Research Associate at UCL in London, is a clinical psychologist with years of experience providing counseling and therapy, including in the NHS NELFT mood and eating disorder division.Now she is venturing into the world of AI, gamification, and mobile mental health to find a way to be able to help people help themselves, launching her emotional fitness game eQuoo worldwide. It is the only game on the NHS Apps Library and has been featured in major news outlets such as Forbes and TechCrunch and she won multiple prizes with PsycApps such as THE EUROPAS Pitch Awards and Pitch@Palace on Tour.
Dr. Emma Fieldhouse, Director,
Future We Want
Dr Emma Fieldhouse spent the last 15 years working within and across the higher education sector and was known as the go-to Interim for UK HE sustainability. She was the Environmental Manager at the University of Leicester for 7 years and more recently Interim Head of Sustainability at LSE in 2019. Emma is a career environmentalist, a trained teacher and an inspirational leader and having worked in public, private, voluntary and HE sectors over the last 20 years is the Director of small but mighty business, Future We Want. Emma is passionate about changing the perception of sustainability and climate change. She has spent her working life finding the most innovative, dynamic ways to provide learning around climate change and carbon footprints.
