Leveling up SeGaP: An Action Research Approach to Develop an Innovation Prize

Innovation prize as a popular policy instrument has a wide range of rationales for inducing and motivating science, technology and innovation (STI) efforts within an innovation system. As one of their oldest applications, they can be utilized to stimulate R&D in a given field. Yet other policy objectives such as supporting commercialization, networking and solving strategic challenges have been considered for them. Since serious gaming is gaining a great attention in the transformation era of education, training and healthcare, public support for the research, development and promotion of SGs is of significant importance. Accordingly, SeGaP is an innovation prize for the stimulation of science, technology and innovation (STI) performance in this area. This paper attempts to present the evolution of SeGaP with an action research approach to review the role of this innovation prize in the enhancement of SG ecosystem. The results show that the best application of SeGaP is to legitimize the SGs in the society and create a network among different stakeholders for the growth of this ecosystem. It is also shown that there are major issues regarding the commercialization of SGs which has to be solved by a mix of different policy instruments.