10 Dec WHY DOES AN SME NEED A GAMELABSNET LABORATORY?
As leaders of the @Gamelabsnet project, it is up to us, as it is almost coming to its end, we have to take stock of the results achieved during these 15 months of operations from its 6 demonstration centres (Bilbao, Madrid, Albi, Bidart, Pau and Leiria), dedicated to bring solutions based on immersive and gamified technologies to the user sectors, showing them their various uses and the advantages of their application in their businesses.
These transversal technologies have shown to be more effective than any other supporting people in their learning or decision-making processes through the use of interactive simulated environments. Their experiential nature and intuitive use make them “user-friendly technologies” and well accepted by users.
During these months more than 1,700 people and a total of 670 companies have visited and accessed some of the services offered by the laboratories: advice, demonstration days, training, pilots,…
Beyond the indicators met by the project, a success for the partners in an adverse environment, the reflection we have made based on the accumulated experience and the most complex challenge we face is how to bring these services to the smaller companies, encouraging them to move towards the new digital economy and supporting them in this process. Raising awareness and convincing through experimentation has been the strategy used by the centres and a deployment of free services which small businesses have barely gotten access.
Most users of the centres have been medium and large companies who attend at the invitation of the partners or their sectoral referents, which is a great support for our network, and are also accompanied by solution providers.
Dissemination has worked for us, when the message has reached them through their usual channels. However small companies are outside these channels, they do not generally belong to sectorial collectives, they do not have resources specifically dedicated to innovation, neither radars to detect initiatives such @Gamelabsnet, they are outside our capacity to reach them.
It is not difficult to conclude that technology continues to be residual for many companies, they still distant from the digital economy, due to a lack of awareness and even more, a lack of training, in the same way that we train our young people in languages, we have to train them in the knowledge of technologies, please do not confuse it with the use of devices to which young people are very used to. Only in this way, future entrepreneurs, management teams and business professionals will introduce technologies in their strategic decisions and daily tasks and they will be better prepared to compete in the job market.
From @gamelabsnet, we have contributed and will continue to contribute our grain of sand to support companies in discovering applications uses’ which offer advantages and solutions to their needs, we will continue to support developers to continue innovating and increasing the catalogue of @Gamelabsnet solutions.
Because we believe that the centres are an effective vehicle for this impulse in the advancement of the application processes of digital technologies in companies, the partners CONFIRM THE CONTINUITY OF THE NETWORK beyond the project that allowed it to be born, we will continue together promoting the centres, sharing good practices, maintaining the interoperability of the Laboratories, promoting R+D+i and extending it to new partners and new enabling technologies
Our thanks to the Sudoe programme and to all the collaborators who have supported us in our purpose.