While working with staff from Yale, the London School of Economics and Vlerick Business School, co-founders Eliza Hochman and Timo Karjalainen discovered that creating effective learning interventions was not easy for either managers or professors. World of Insights games have been developed to tackle this problem in business schools and in businesses.
“One challenge when working with companies is that they think a game isn’t serious enough. They don’t understand that surprising or fun elements can actually have a purpose, like pushing people to think outside the box. The clients don’t know what a game is until they have experienced it once”, says Leonardo Meeus, Director of the Energy Center at Vlerick Business School.
World of Insights’ off-the-shelf business games blend deceptively simple card and board game features that help create a shared space in a meeting or training. During the game, players face powerful questions to cover various aspects of business, ranging from innovation and personal development to leadership and neuroscience. The players answer the questions individually or in a dialogue with the group, sometimes illustrating their ideas by drawing and doodling.
World of Insights have already helped business educators in Belgium, Italy, France, Finland, the UK, and the US improve results in various areas, such as strategy, marketing and corporate responsibility. A concrete example of the game design can be taken from the energy sector, where World of Insights have developed two games for Vlerick Business School. The games are used to help understand the shifting energy sector landscape, exploring new possibilities and innovations for the stakeholders. These games have been played by C-level executives from multinational energy companies, such as Elia, 50 Hertz and Caruna.
According to market analysts such as Technavio and Ambient Insight, game-based learning will experience double-digit growth for the next five years.
“There is definitely a growing demand for game-based learning. One of the reasons is technological advancement. But the more fundamental shift behind this is the change in the ways we approach learning and innovation, going from top-down models to individualised learning, action learning and co-creation. Games and gamification are a great way to put these ideas into practice”, explains CEO & Co-Founder Eliza Hochman.
The company is launching a web shop for ready-made business games and tools for transforming classrooms and meeting rooms into playrooms. They are also working on digital and hybrid products, where cards and other game elements can interact with touch screens.
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