BrazilStart-up TRIGGX provides gamification platform for change consultants
Following growing interest from consulting firms across Europe for its gamification suite, Dutch consultancy House of Performance has opened up its platform for external players. Under the TRIGGX label, the newly launched tech start-up provides products and solutions for change consultants, helping them design and apply gaming elements to improve the performance of teams and individuals.
Using alternative gaming in the business landscape as a means for learning and capability development has been seeing increasing popularity in recent years, lifted by growing opportunities offered by smart technology. As a result, it's not just employees in operational roles that are playing games for the company’s sake, but also senior leaders and managers that can be found playing computer games, escape rooms or other forms of game-related interventions.
Hundreds of large companies have so far successfully deployed gamification – including serious gaming and virtual reality – to support their change objectives, whether related to implementing a new way of working, adopting agile and lean techniques, or bolstering collaboration within and among teams. The UK government has reportedly used alternative interventions to better prepare its Whitehall teams for Brexit, Google is using gaming in human resources for recruitment purposes, while Dutch bank Rabobank has rolled out the approach to improve the commercial effectiveness of its sales teams.
According to Gartner, there is only one way forward for gamification, and that is up. The market is currently estimated by the firm to be worth $5.5 billion, up from only half a billion just five years ago, with double digit growth rates forecasted for the coming five years. Demonstrating the market’s growth, the international analyst group expects that by 2020, over 80% of the companies in the Forbes Global 2000 list will have applied gamification for at least one instance. 
The birth of TRIGGX
House of Performance, a management consulting and interim firm from the Netherlands, was a pioneer in gamification during the early days of the technology’s developments. “A few years ago we discovered that the introduction of game elements in the workplace can changes behaviour. It enabled our consultants to help clients significantly improve the performance of their employees [sales, operations, customer service] and their employee satisfaction,” explained Ralph van den Bosch, a partner at the consultancy.
In 2015 House of Performance took its offering to the next level when it started developing a platform that offers interventions and games as a scalable solution for change issues within organisations. “After receiving a lot of interest from consulting firms from all over the world, we decided it was time to make our platform available for all.”
With the launch of TRIGGX, the consultancy has now delivered on its ambition. Van den Bosch: “Our platform is built by change consultants, psychologists, coaches and game developers. Years of experience in change management, performance management and game theory, all together in one tool. The platform offers scalable solutions that support change transformations.”
Consultant as the client
The consulting firm opted to carve-out its product and position it as a separate tech start-up in order to achieve more focus, while preparing the gaming arm for bold ambitions. Contrary to House of Performance’s consulting services, TRIGGX doesn’t focus on the end client (consultancy buyers) but on consultants working at peer consultancies or as an independent. Amid a heating and digitising landscape, consultants across Europe are seeking to ramp up their change offerings with smart technologies, and instead of inventing the wheel themselves, they can now seamlessly plug into the TRIGGX platform.
Plans drafted for TRIGGX show that the tech-player expects to welcome “a couple of thousand” new players in the coming months onto its platform, from Scandinavia to Brazil and Italy. The first major client has meanwhile signed up – a Danish consultancy with more than 500 consultants and employees will embed TRIGGX into selected projects it delivers at clients.
To realise its goals, a core team of specialists has been freed up to lead TRIGGX, including Garry Turkington (formerly Amazon), Jody Pietersz (formerly KPN) and Maarten Holland (previously a consultant at House of Performance).
