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When city officials tested the concept on a busy Stockholm street, it was clear that "the fun theory" had powerful effects. Before the lot- tery, average speed in the zone was 32 kilometers per hour, or about 20 miles per hour. Nearly 25,000 cars passed by the speed cameras during the three days of the experiment. Analysis showed that, during this time, traffic speed in the designated zone dropped by more than 20 per- cent—just because officials tapped into people's desire for play. (For more details on this and other ideas, go to www.thefuntheory.com.) The Speed Camera Lottery is an entertaining example of the way a city can improve public safety by engaging its residents in an enjoy- able activity. Similarly, we in the management education community can achieve specific goals among our constituents if we think deeply about fun as a motivator. One approach is to gamify the programs we develop for stakeholders. A Winning Theory Gamification recently has gained attention as an important trend in technology, but despite the name it is not about creating games. Rather, it's a strategy of using game dynamics to engage audiences and accomplish goals. According to a Google trend chart, there were no searches for the term "gamifica- tion" in 2010. Yet by the end of 2011, Gartner Research predicted the following: ■ Fifty percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify them by 2015. ■ Seventy percent of Forbes' Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified applica- tion by 2014. 26 November/December 2012 BizEd ■ Organizations will allocate US$2.8 billion in direct spending to gamification by 2015. The year 2011 saw two other milestones: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested US$20 million to develop game-based learning tools for kids, and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania offered the first MBA course in gamification. Silicon Val- ley was enthusiastic, with Bing Gor- don of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins noting that "gamification is as important as social and mobile" applications. But why does it work? In a 2011 Harvard Business School study, Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer analyzed thousands of daily diary entries of employees across a set of firms. They deter- mined that tapping into an indi- vidual's sense of progress—what the authors called "meaningful forward momentum"—could be used to motivate and engage employees, customers, and stake- holders. Such momentum could be achieved through game mechanics such as conferring points for doing certain tasks or awarding badges to mark levels of accomplishment. This approach has the potential for turning work into play. Serious Fun It's clear that gamification could have significant implications out- side the b-school classroom. As marketers at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, we won- dered if gamification could be used to achieve marketing goals in a nontraditional way. Business schools are engaged in constant dialogues with the students we hope to enroll, the alumni we want to engage, and the business practitioners we wish to expose to our faculty's expertise. Traditionally, those of us in the marketing func- tion have used push tactics to get information to our stakeholders. We publish magazines, produce newslet- ters, send tweets, and host training sessions for brand ambassadors who are about to graduate. We encour- age our faculty to attend conferences or log onto Skype to engage with alumni groups and the media. How might our tactics change if we started to think more creatively about what motivates our stake- holders' behavior? Human beings seek rewards, status, achievement, opportunities for self-expression, chances to compete, and situations where they can display altruism. What if we designed programs that deliver the rewards and social interaction that our audiences crave while achieving the market- ing outcomes that we need? What if we tried gamification? Duke Rolls the Dice In July 2011 at Fuqua, we launched our first attempt at gami- fication with a student and alumni outreach campaign. We ran the campaign over a custom Web site and across social media outlets for 25 days. Our concept was