Obstacles and Challenges in the Use of Gamification for Virtual Idea Communities

Virtual idea communities (VIC) are a relatively new phenomenon in business. These communities, in which distributed groups of individual customers focus on voluntarily sharing and elaborating innovation ideas, are used by firms to integrate customers into the ideation for new product development rooted in Chesbrough’s (2003) open innovation paradigm. Developers and decision makers realized especially within the last decade that games or game-like appeals could serve as appropriate gamifications to attract people to participate in VICs. Therefore, gamification gained momentum and has been widely implemented into VICs. The use of gamification does, however, not lead to this intended positive outcome per se. Because of that, obstacles and challenges in the use of gamification have to be considered, which has often been neglected in practice. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to address this topic and to describe major obstacles and challenges in the use of gamification in VICs.