Innovation on the Edge January 14, 2009, 11:50AM EST

How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation

This video game demonstrates in its structure and scoring some fundamental principles for training employees to think creatively

By John Hagel and John Seely Brown

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The degree of challenge increases dramatically as players play WoW.

We are caught in a pincer grip between intensifying competitive pressure and accelerating change in the landscape around us, creating enormous performance pressures. 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?

For an answer to this question, executives would be well advised to look at World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online game. Few executives have heard of this game, much less participated in it, despite the fact that over 10 million players are active in it around the world. Upon hearing this, most executives are likely to respond that "that's an awful lot of pimply teenagers," falling back on a conventional stereotype about video game players. In fact, the majority of the players are in the 23-39-year-old bracket and are deeply engaged. The average player invests about 23 hours per week playing the game.

Points for Experience

In WoW, performance is measured in terms of experience points. Players accumulate these by performing a variety of tasks that become more challenging as the game progresses. As players accumulate experience points, they advance to higher levels in the game, culminating at this point in level 80 (a new add-on recently expanded the number of levels from 70 in order to keep experienced players challenged).

The degree of complexity and challenge increases dramatically as you advance across levels, and the number of experience points needed in order to advance also increases sharply with each level. Yet the number of hours required to get there actually decreases. Experienced players become adept at leveraging the resources available in and around WoW to learn faster and advance faster even as the challenges become more difficult. In contrast to the diminishing returns to learning that we often encounter in business, players in WoW appear to have joined an environment where there are increasing returns to learning.

As with many promising developments on the edge, it is often hard to discern how or why this might be relevant to those playing in core business arenas. WoW matters because it creates a powerful platform for learning, without a training program in sight. Many of the approaches used by WoW could be very helpful to business executives as they strive to improve performance more rapidly in their own organizations.

Bottom-line lessons for executives

Reduce barriers to entry and to early advancement

WoW is carefully structured so that anyone can join and quickly gain a sense of accomplishment. The early tasks are relatively simple, but novice players quickly learn to improvise and innovate in their approach to performance challenges.

Provide clear and rich metrics to assess performance

WoW provides players with an overall metric for performance in the form of experience points and levels, but it also enables players to assess in real time their own performance and the performance of teammates along a variety of dimensions. One of the key innovations in the game offers players the ability to craft personal "dashboards" to monitor their performance on certain tasks. Corporations have begun to offer senior executives dashboards to monitor key aspects of corporate performance.

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