Olivier Glassey and Jean‐Henry Morin
of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interactivity.” Furthermore serious game“ came into wide use with the emergence of the Serious Games Initiative in 2002” which is“ focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector”( Susi et al. 2007). Furthermore, gaming techniques have been used very successfully for decades in innovation and market research. Early adopters of such techniques were Silicon Valley companies who needed to find alternative ways to create new products. A notable example of this is the Innovation Games initiative of Luke Hohmann( Hohmann 2006) now turned into an online collaborative service 1.
3. Research methodology
ThinkServices is a think tank on Services Science and Innovation that was created in 2008 by the Institute of Services Science of the University of Geneva and the Technology Foresight Office of the Canton of Geneva in Switzerland. The ThinkGroup Data, Society and Transparency( TG‐DST) was initiated in 2010 by ThinkServices and the Geneva data protection and transparency commissioners. This group brought together around 20 data protection and transparency experts as well as professionals and academics from various disciplines( law, management, information systems, graphic design, and human resources).
The main research objective of TG‐DST was to raise awareness on data protection and transparency issues in the organizational field, i. e. to address one of those wicked problems mentioned in the introduction by making the relevant laws and regulation understandable and usable for an audience of professionals who are not legal experts.
In order to reach that research objective we set up monthly half‐day meetings that were held throughout 2011 with the goal of developing a self‐assessment toolkit on data protection and transparency. A deadline for launching the service was set for January 28th 2012 on the occasion of the Data Protection Day. The focus on organizations quickly appeared based on the lack of understanding of these issues among the various stakeholders( HR specialists, top management, IT management, employee, etc.). Moreover, the service had to be based on realistic data protection and transparency issues, and to provide recommendations, legal references and links to concrete examples. Four subgroups focused on stakeholder profiles defining scenarios on the basis of a generic storytelling canvas similar to the ones used in fairy tales such as the Little Red Riding Hood. The stories were then reworked in order to ensure coherence and were validated by data protection and transparency commissioners both at federal and cantonal levels. The first implementation of the service was done by a web design agency and was launched in French as planned on the Data Protection Day( January 28, 2012). Currently Thinkdata. ch is also available in German, Italian and English.
4. Description of the solution
Our main objective was to bridge the understanding and awareness gap found between the increasing complexity of legal frameworks and their target audiences. The area of data protection and transparency is a good example of this situation, as these laws impact employees, managers and citizens from both organizational and personal standpoints. Moreover, these requirements are increasingly difficult to meet, with the digitization of our society, cloud computing and the growing use of personal devices in organizations( BYOD, Bring Your Own Device). Indeed connected smartphones along with their many apps, their GPS, etc., raises new issues which were unheard of ten years ago. The EU Data Protection reform( Hustinx 2013, De Terwangne 2013) is currently underway( see European Data Protection Reform) to adapt the 1995 rules in order to offer more control on personal data, with notions such as“ explicit consent” or the“ right to be forgotten”( European Commission 2012).
We believe that an appropriate way to bridge these gaps between the complexity of legal requirements and the understanding of the target audience is education and training. Indeed we wish to raise awareness on these issues in a way that is both engaging and useful. In order to achieve this we chose a design thinking approach. Indeed some members of the ThinkServices think tank had a technology and innovation background and since the objective was to design a service( artifact), Design Science appeared to be a suitable methodology. These techniques have been used by ThinkServices since the beginning( Glassey & al. 2011). Globally our approach is adapted from techniques originating from design thinking: for an introduction see
1 Innovation Games, online service, http:// innovationgames. com /( retrieved Jan 2013)
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