The interviews with entrepreneurs and managers were analyzed by using narrative analysis, an approach in narrative research. This approach allows the researcher to
“organize and interpret empirical data that describe some more or less consistent events, happenings and actions” as Eriksson and Kovalainen (2008, 217) explain.
Likewise, Allen (2017, 1069) posits that “narrative analysis focuses on collecting stories about a certain type of experience”. Hence, I used narrative analysis to understand the participants’ stories about their experience in doing gamification business.
My analysis proceeded in stages. The interviews were recorded, then transcribing, reading and coding, re-coding, grouping into themes, and interpreting findings.
Transcribing interviews into textual data was done manually. Reading text was done many times to have comprehensive understanding of the participants’ stories they shared.
The purpose of coding was to identify different themes and the relationships between them. “Coding is one of the simplest ways to analyze qualitative data. A code can be a word that is used to describe or summarize a sentence, a paragraph, or even a whole piece of text, such as an interview” (Myers 2013, 253). “Codes are tags or labels for assigning units of meaning to the descriptive or inferential information compiled during a study.
Codes are useful for retrieving and organizing the data, and they speed up the analysis”
(Miles and Huberman 1994; Myers 2013, 253).
Being comparable to the stage of transcribing, coding was also conducted manually.
The stage of recoding highlighted the classification of code into specific settings which then helped emerge themes, or similar subjects.
Coding data provided same results of content. Specifically, all the participants were directed to share their experience in: decision-making pattern, resource availability for gamification investment, organizational resources, purposes, expectation, strategies, experiencing that mentioned challenges, problems, incidents and problem-solving approach, self-evaluation, learning, future planning. Afterwards, these results were grouped into three stage of investment, comprising the preparation stage (stage 1), the implementation process (stage 2), and outcome and further development (stage 3).
Detailed classification was given as follows:
TABLE 4. Description of coding scheme
Description of coding Chronological order Decision-making pattern
The preparation stage Resource availability for gamification
investment, organizational resources Purposes, expectation
Strategies
The implementation process Experiencing that mentioned challenges,
problems, incidents, and problem-solving approach
Self-evaluation, learning, future planning Outcome and further development
Findings were interpreted in the form of narrative and in chronological order as indicated in Table 4 above.
4 INTERPRETATION OF FINDINGS 4.1 Entrepreneur A
Entrepreneur A is the current CEO of the company A, a Jyväskylä-based company established by three people in the year 2015. The company is performed under joint ownership by other two co-founders who are also partners simultaneously, apart from the entrepreneur. Therefore, the company is run by the three members who are both owners and employees, providing mobile game-like applications for family support. Specifically, an application encouraging youth-related topics and interaction between the youth and parents is an example of product that uses gamified solution to well-being promotion. The application’s objective is to strengthen mental health and well-being, to support the parents' view of the youth’s age and /or level of development, and to enable the parent to reflect and consider their own parenting. Besides, it helps to alleviate shame, for example when parents try to talk to their children about sexuality.
The entrepreneur and her two partners operate the company as part-time entrepreneurs while concurrently fulfil full-time jobs in different social care sectors. They have special expertise in caring child welfare, working with families and the ground of disability. This was the greatest motivation for embarking on the business since the entrepreneur pursued the aims that was designing helpful and entertaining games for improving communication between parents and the youth, and for motivating families to use the company’s applications. She explained that she and her two partners desired to bring new technological invent to professionals who have worked in social care sector.
It was apparent from the entrepreneur’s sharing that she had the goals in advance which then determined further actions. In the preparation stage, she heavily relies on available resources, including her expertise and work experience in social care, and her personal relationship with two co-founders. They were thinking and discussing about the company’s concept, type of business, et cetera. She responded:
“Hmm, well, actually, when we started to think about that concept of the company, when we were thinking, whether we should establish the company or not, and what kind of company we are, we want to have, like a modern company, and we want to bring the tools that are being used in the social care for the professionals.”
Taking advantage of expertise in social care sector, the entrepreneur got confident in assessing a potential market for the products at that time and in the future as well.
Accordingly, she recognized what strength they possessed, and how they should turn it into market opportunity. As she disclosed, they did not have many competitors at that time, hence an ideal chance to implement the business idea. The entrepreneur expected to improve her own knowledge about new science that would help her expertise in social care sector.
Owning to micro-business, she stressed the significance of both internal and external coordination that was shown by communication between the company’s members, and between the company and partners. The coordination was clearly underlined in the implementation stage when they got assistance from Jyväskylä university, a Kuopio-based IT company and other companies in training, doing market analysis, designing and proceeding products in regard to attributes like pictures, music, coding and so forth. She answered:
“…and the communication is very, very important especially when our company is so small…because we have this joint ownership then we really can’t do big our decisions by ourselves… we are using a lot of different companies that we are doing the cooperation with them…thinking with them together: How should we market, for example this specific application and how should we proceed with this, and these matter?”
However, risks are absolutely unavoidable when building a business, so her company is not an exception. She did not anticipate that the problems happened and consequently there was no prior preparation for that circumstance even though she had a tendency to avoid as many risks as possible, and also took advance planning for potential risks. The biggest problem she had been faced with was customers’ attitude towards the company’s products. Customers, professionals whose jobs in social care sector, resisted learning and putting this new technology into practice.
The additional problem pertained to limited supply of digital devices, such as iPads, which was very essential for the use of gamified applications. As a consequence, the situation required professionals to be equipped with a device. Further, the entrepreneur pointed out this problem in online newspaper Talentia-lehti in the year 2016.
“If other companies offer digital devices applied to this industry, it would help us all.
Professionals would then be able to use the applications more easily.”
As she expressed, because the business was quite new, they felt alone in the industry.
There had been no other companies that developed the same type of work methods as them, thereby constraining the supply of additional devices.
When the entrepreneur was questioned about how she dealt with the problems, the answer implied the important role of customers and their collaboration with the company in finding resolution.
She acknowledged that she had learnt a lot from real experience after implementing the business. Meanwhile, she stated opinions that investment in gamification was not truly smooth since they were faced with many challenges stemming from customer demands, municipal procedures, time-consuming process for breakthrough, even their joint ownership because each of owners had their own knowledge and different viewpoints.
But after all, the entrepreneur has been satisfied with the way they have made collective decisions so far since they realized the effectiveness of this business investment was sufficient for new entrepreneurs like them. More importantly, she held a viewpoint that she might have a chance to boost further portfolio investment, but she did not desire to do that as she and her two co-founders have not been big risk-takers. Large investment would bring about both positive and negative effects. She was frightened that her company might end in failure or incur debt accumulation in case of negative effect. “Yes, we are satisfied to the decision that we started a company. First of all, we have not been like big risk-takers. And I think that if we would have taken more of bigger risks, then there is a chance that we would have more products and maybe we would be more successful. But on the other hand, there is also a risk that we would have failed or there would be a lot of debts,” she said.
In the interview’s final session, the entrepreneur disclosed that her company had a plan for developing next new products. However, they were not certain about this plan because it depended on external support, particularly capital investment that they could get from external sources.
4.2 Entrepreneur B
The entrepreneur B was the co-founder and senior partner of the company B which was established in 2015 while his daughter is CEO. The company B located in Helsinki is a pioneer of the computer aided remote rehabilitation in Finland. It offers a rehabilitation solution enabling professional level physiotherapy to be provided in home environment.
The company employs motion sensor, which identifies and tracks joints of the human body, then track patient’s performance and compare it with the exercise stored in the company database during the initial phase of the treatment. This approach enables instant biofeedback provided for the patient. The approach also motivates patients/customers by providing a gamified user experience.
The entrepreneur has been running his own business in St. Petersburg, providing serial software since the year 1993. Thus, the way he made decisions in daily routine was also influenced by long experience. He told me that he usually made decisions without advance planning, overall hinged on situations. He came to decisions by analyzing situations, addressing related questions, carrying out SWOT analysis. In addition, he underlined that an entrepreneur’s characteristics was risk-taking behaviour. For this reason, he tended to be more adventurous, and did not hard ponder about the business investment. Despite being a risk-taker and flexibly deciding, he also attempted to avoid incidents.
The entrepreneur underlined the importance of building relationships with partners and collaborating with employees. Since company B was still small, he realized collaboration with partners was absolutely vital for co-investing and co-developing in gamified healthcare solutions. At the same time, he demonstrated how he could find partners as well. He normally took part in many technological exhibitions, then he followed up companies’ information that he had obtained during those exhibitions. He actively arranged meetings with them and afterwards he had partners among those participants.
Because of limited Finnish skills, he mostly depended on his Finnish employees who were familiar with local culture and custom, could capture changing circumstances in Finland.
When questioning about the motivations for starting the business, the entrepreneur answered that he received a present from his daughter and wife, thereby partly inspiring his business idea. The present was called Wii, a small game for console incorporating sports simulation, for example tennis, baseball, golf, et cetera. Besides, his inspiration for the idea came from his hobby-game playing, and his personal trait as a risk-taker. He replied that:
“I am quite old already. I’m more than 70, and I’m lazy, and fat person. And so it was my own ideas that I needed to move more.”
His sharing indicated a willingness to try new things, and new challenges. Subsequently, he decided to set up the business in association with his daughter. He expected rapid growth of the market for mobile games using external sensors, then increased turnover.
The entrepreneur possessed long experience in running prior business and expertise in programming and software development. He used them as competitive advantages in the implementation stage. He asserted that programming and software development were his outstanding abilities, accordingly he felt confident that they had no significant competition in this area. Thanks to this distinct advantage, he confirmed his company was able to penetrate the markets earlier. On the other hand, he was aware of a huge potential market with confirmed target customers who were the elderly and office professionals.
He himself was a senior and interested in playing games that motivated him to firstly focus on the elderly-oriented products.
The subsequent process took place smoothly since the entrepreneur possessed valuable experience in his prior business setting. He told me that:
“…We already know the population who we are addressing it, we already segmented this market, we already built the picture of ideal customer for every segment. And we also already work on our business proposition for every segment and every type of customer.
And we also work on their methodology, and logistics of distribution of games and sensors. And we also keep on building the website and populate it with important query answers and stuff like that.”
Eventually, he disclosed that his company got fairly big customer base.
However, the entrepreneur also declared problems that the company has been faced with during the stage of implementation as well as relevant solutions. They have been still in
the process of discussing and dealing with these challenges so far. One problem which was in the entrepreneur’s anticipation referred to sensor shipment. Users/customers were required to purchase sensors if they desired to play the game using body movement. As he expressed, Finland provided good transport system and services, but if customers from outside Finland wanted to purchase his product, shipment was a concern and needed considering seriously.
“…In Finland post works very good. So I am not afraid to distribute it in Finland. But what if you would like to sell it to Germany or Denmark, then this shipment problem must be seriously considered. We are discussing it and we still are in the process of making decision,” he said.
The further problem stemmed from downside of gamified applications, pertaining to public opinions about game-like applications. He explained that there were both positive and negative sides of using gamified solutions. Games attracted players’ interest and so they became addicted to games, reporting negative side of game-like solutions.
Apart from those problems, the entrepreneur decided to invest new method development, meaning that he accepted trade-off between the company’s strength and innovation in gamified healthcare solutions. He contended:
“We intentionally narrow down our focus in software skills to mobile platform, while in current situation there are a lot of other areas where our software skills could be in high demand.”
In conclusion, the entrepreneur was rare satisfied with his decisions on the business and always wished to find better solutions if he had a chance to re-decide. In the interview’s closing session, he shared a fairly detailed plan for the next phase that developed new products and support sensors, analyzed and expanded different market segments, and flexibly reacted to changing contexts. He replied that if the company successfully proceeded with the next phase, they would start looking for investment from external sources.
4.3 Manager C
Manager C plays the role as a project manager in the company C, a Jyväskylä-based company which was founded in 2016. The company’s mission is to brings a revolution to the life science industry by providing gamified information that raises public awareness
of disease, healthcare and well-being. For instance, game C, one of the company’s product, enabling the player to control the human immune system cells to defend against attacking viruses and bacteria. The player develops new vaccines and uses them as power-up to enhance their defenses. Their clients are companies operating in pharmaceutical and health industry.
Manager C works as a third party, being in charge of communicating between the company and clients, overseeing the production, and developing organizational processes and culture. Besides, he is also a supervisor of a team including programmers, artists, game designers. He disclosed that the business idea came from his CEO’s inspiration for a poker game. His CEO was actually a professional poker player, and so he was fascinated by game mechanics. His CEO said that playing game was a great way to attract people’s attention, for instance games could be designed for encouraging people to learn science.
From manager C’s sharing, they defined the company’s goal which then determined their action. They desired to bring the meaningful entertainment in the field of disease prevention and health awareness by designing games and integrating them into a scientific context. The products would help people to gain knowledge about science or medicine.
They seized an opportunity to implement the business when pharmaceutical industry was in the middle of digitalization process, thereby demand for new solutions and partnership with start-ups.
In the implementation process, the company’s strategy relied on internal and external collaboration. Internal collaboration related to manager C’s team members’ expertise, and an importance of communication between team members. External collaboration mentioned relationships with partners, investors and clients.
Characterized by the nature of business-to-business, both the collaboration was extremely crucial to the company. They primarily focused on building up a network of partners in the same industry. As manager C revealed, they had a wide network both in the game industry, and in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. Large network was helpful for them to improve their understanding of customer demand and get assistance if need be. Moreover, they had a powerful advisory board who played a key role in helping the company with decision-making process. The board comprised gaming advisors, science advisors, education advisor and pharmacy advisors. Collaboration was strongly
highlighted through customer-oriented action when the company tailored products fitting every specific client and the clients were encouraged to co-creating products in return.
Manager C told me about his company’s strategy as follows:
“…we need to listen to the customer and like tailor the product for their needs. Or if we are like doing something that would change the company’s direction, then we need to inform and listen to the investor.”
“…like a newbie…it’s much better work with the people in the pharmaceutical industry, and network with the people who are in that industry, because they have like years of experience and years of know-how, of how the industry works…I would like to say that the one of the biggest wins in our strategy has been we’ve been able to find these people
“…like a newbie…it’s much better work with the people in the pharmaceutical industry, and network with the people who are in that industry, because they have like years of experience and years of know-how, of how the industry works…I would like to say that the one of the biggest wins in our strategy has been we’ve been able to find these people