Valuing innovation: an exploratory study of developing business models for 'serious' computer games

• Start date: 01 December 2009
• End date: 31 May 2010

'Serious games' seek to apply computer games technologies and the skills of computer game developers to issues facing businesses and organisations.

One impediment to the development and wider use of 'serious games', has been to establish robust business models for their production and exchange. With their benefits novel and difficult to quantify in financial terms, valuing and pricing these products has proved problematic, making it hard to come-up with estimates regarding the size of the potential market. While a significant constraint on innovation in this field, these problems have wider relevance to sectors where the benefits of innovation are uncertain and difficult to quantify.

This project aims to contribute to theory development in this area by exploring the relevance of the notion of 'regimes of worth' to this issue through a two case empirical study of serious games innovation that will investigate how the value, and ultimately the underlying business model, of these innovations are constructed through the interactions between 'serious games' developers and their actual or potential clients. Further, the project seeks to assess the scope for, and potential practical and theoretical contribution of, future research on this topic using such an approach.