Innovation Game is a project aimed at stimulating the establishment of a sustainable innovative environment for game development and game-related businesses, through interaction and cooperation with partners within northern Norrland’s innovation system.
Unfortunately, it is very limited geographically and the largest cluster is in Stockholm, which often is ranked as the best environment for game development in the world. In 2014, Skellefteå municipality, together with the municipalities of Piteå, Boden and Luleå, decided to invest in the gaming industry.
The collaboration is known as Arctic Game Lab.
The mission of Arctic Game Lab is to establish a games development industry in the northern part of Sweden.
One of the aims of the project is also to color the existing innovation system with the values and attitudes of the games industry and to introduce elements of gamification into more traditional industries.
The work has been very successful and, one year later, the region had almost 30 full-time game developers in four companies.
The next step is to further strengthen the innovation processes within the northern Swedish games industry.
Skellefteå Science City is the owner of the project Innovation Game, which has four sub-projects.
- A testbed for game development.
- A testbed for game development.
- Creative workshops for digital knowledge and inclusion.
- Innovation as competence.
- Provide expertise to the games industry.
The project was funded by Skellefteå, Piteå and Boden municipality, Region Norrbotten and Region Västerbotten as well as the European Regional Development Fund.
Project owner was Science City Skellefteå AB and project management as well as implementation was done by a division at European Minds AB that later became Creative Crowd AB.
