Gamified solution to sharing information between start-ups

1. StartLife Community Building
A gamified solution, by Hans de Haan
January 2014

2. StartLife
• Startup incubator connected to Wageningen UR, Netherlands
• Est. 2010
• Aim: stimulate and foster entrepreneurship in agrifood, life sciences
and environment
• Offer: educational activities, networking and active support and
coaching
• The support is offered in the fields of:
• Making strategic decisions about market, product and business
model
• Acquisition of start-up capital and housing
• Access to a broad network of coaches and experts

3. Problem
• As much as starters can learn from the partners in the network, there’s a
whole lot of “unharvested knowledge” between them. It’s obvious that
the starters will not share their company’s secrets or information that’s
prone to competition. However, a lot of their learnings, network and
expertise can be shared without any risk for the company, and be very
helpful for their peer starters. Moreover, the expectation is that sharing
will be beneficial to the one sharing as well.
• Special theme sessions have been organized, but the attendance for these
sessions was very low.
• With the instruments currently available, it seems difficult to get the
starters to share with each other.

4. Player types
Within the target group of start-ups, we expect
• achievers
• explorers
to be overrepresented, compared to an average population.

5. Game mechanics: 1
Main goal is to get the players to share
Idea: online business tool
Mechanism 1: filling in the information of the business model canvas
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Quality of information rated by team of experts
Sharing information is always mutual and on invitation
Higher quality of information leads to more points
More points will lead to easy acceptations of sharing requests

6. Game mechanics: 2
Mechanism 2: adding investors to the game
• Investors can fill in a profile: starters can decide if an investor is possibly
interesting
• Startups get access to a pool of investors, after filling in enough
information that is rated with enough points
• Invitations can go both ways: investor  startup and startup  investor
• Investors rate the quality of the business case and the information
provided. The higher the ratings, the more access players will likely have
to other’s information, through extra invitations

7. Game mechanics: 3
Mechanism 3: adding unexpectedness / fun
• Many players have a research background, so we expect them to be more
explorative than average
• When filling in detailed optional fields, they will be rewarded with
unexpected fun badges for exploring more of the area than strictly
necessary