First attempt at a thesis abstract

From my initial idea I worked my way through some litterature and quite a few articles to come up with my first attempt at an abstract for my gamification thesis:

“User collaboration is a goal for many business applications today, but they are often faced with challenges motivating users to voluntarily engage in providing information and/or take part in collaborative activities [Ellis, Clarence A., Simon J. Gibbs, and Gail Rein, 1991].

Gamification as “a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support user’s overall value creation.” [Huotari and Hamari, 2012, Defining Gamification] has been suggested as a possible approach to address these problems. Many computer games today can boast with extensive and elaborate activities and as such are a natural source of inspiration for such an endeavor.

The hypothesis is that the use of game mechanics from existing online computer games can be used to help design a solution that engages people to actively participate and collaborate in a ‘gamified application’.”

From here I started looking for a collaborative context that would be a suitable target for this endeavor and ended up with open innovation. Open innovation being a paradigm that to me represents a perfect environment for testing this hypothesis. It would introduce a unique platform for businesses and individuals to find and create new ideas, discover and develop solutions and work as toolbox to inspire and motivate for collaborative efforts to take on existing and future challenges. But the big questions remains; will it work?