SOCIAL BUSINESS

Why Smart Companies Should Adopt the Lessons of Gaming

Salvatore Salamone | Date: 11-07-11 | Comments

To engage employees and tap unrealized problem-solving potential, companies should be taking their playbook from the gaming community.

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Why Smart Companies Should Adopt the Lessons of Gaming - A Success Story

For years, medical researchers have asked people to donate the unused CPU cycles of their home PCs to help with protein-folding problems. Volunteers would download software that performs intricate folding exercises on digital models of common proteins in the hopes that a folded protein would be found with the right geometric shape and the right chemical bonding properties to, for example, block a more dangerous protein from attaching to a cell and infecting it.

This brute force approach has been tried before in other scientific research efforts (notably SETI@Home). But recently, researchers had a protein folding problem that could benefit from human intuition. Scientists wanted to know the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme produced by a retrovirus similar to HIV. They had not been able to solve the protein structure using common computational methods.

Researchers noted that people have better spatial reasoning skills than computers, and that using both humans and computers might accelerate the resolution of this problem and other similar classes of problems.

Using FoldIt, researchers asked gamers to help them find the protein. Teams of players folded molecules and rotated amino acids to create 3D protein structures. They earned points for different things such as a structure's stability. In just three weeks, gamers deciphered the structure of a key protein in the development of AIDS that had stumped scientists for years, according to PCMag.com.
If businesses could tap similar gaming features (rewards for small successes, incentives for collaborative work, etc.), they could energize their workforce to tackle problems that need new approaches in today's evolving marketplace.

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