Game Devs can help corporates solve their challenges

Sweden is one of the world’s leaders in the gaming industry with thousands of companies -from big players such as Massive Entertainment to startups- developing innovative computer games. But how can the skills of game developers help established companies with their challenges?

That was the idea behind Ignite Gaming, a unique matchmaking that we held in early May as part of the Sweden’s Innovationsriksdag. 

– The normal Ignite startup have a scalable technology or solution ready to be verified and commercialized together with a customer. A gaming startup has another challenge: they need to earn money to put food on the table while developing their new world success such as Minecraft. At the same time, we have discovered that many of the Ignite corporates are curious about gamification and the gaming community, explains Stina Lantz, Program Manager at Ignite Sweden. 

Ignite Gaming was the first attempt to match these two very different worlds. To give the startups a chance to understand what type of challenges the corporates were willing to solve with gaming, the 7 corporates created a couple of challenges. These challenges were presented to around 40 gaming startups. Afterwards, 11 of them came in with potential solutions and 8 qualified for meetings held during the matchmaking.

The purpose of the meetings was to define the scope in more detail, and then hopefully both parties would have as much information needed to decide whether they should start a pilot project together. 

– Based on the feedback we have gotten from startups and corporates so far, it has turned out really great. We are eager to continue developing this concept further together with all the incubators working with gaming. After all, gaming is one of Sweden’s biggest exports!, says Stina.

The companies that met gaming startups during the two-day event were SAAB, Pfizer, Volvo Group, Dynapac and IBM, as well as the municipalities of Karlskrona and Järfälla, part of our project Ignite Public.

– We have a longstanding experience of creating compelling applications with the use of gamification and VR simulations, and our goal is to help corporate clients with their business cases. However, as a small company, it can be both difficult and time-consuming to get the attention of the right person in a huge corporation. Therefore we did not hesitate to join Ignite Gaming in Karlskrona. We got the chance to have 7 matchmade meetings during one afternoon and one morning. Very productive indeed!, says Jaana Nykänen from Divine Robot, one of the 7 startups that took part in this matchmaking. The other startups were Station Interactive, Insert Coin, Attractive Interactive, Something We Made, Guru Games and Blackdrop Interactive.

Ignite Gaming was organized in collaboration with Gameport, Blekinge Business Incubator, Blue Science Park Karlskrona and Netport Science Park.