Gamification has been a hot trend in the hotbed of innovation, the Silicon Valley. That's why it does not come as a surprise that innovative locations on the other side of the globe are not lacking in their own take on that concept. SAP Labs Israel in Ra'anana – right outside of Tel Aviv - two weeks ago hosted an Innojam around Gamification. For 24 hours 7 teams worked on their take on gamifying business applications. Two full-day workshops on gamification prepared and pumped up the 30+ participants who had to show their six-minute demos on Thursday afternoon to their SAP Labs colleagues and the critical jury. And gamification platform provider Beintoo, one of the hottest European startups right now, came all the way from Milano in Italy, to help pimping the apps with game mechanics.

And while I thought Angry Birds plush toys and pig-noises may excite the crowd and set the mood, Man! Was I wrong! In a country with a population and a religion where pigs are seen as non-kosher, they wouldn't even make pig-sounds. Not that I asked them to eat the green plush toy pigs. But luckily, they are Israelis. As one Israeli friend told me: "If there are rules, Israelis would immediately try to circumvent them."

After quickly considering how they can overcome the rules around pigs, they all told me "I take one, but not for me, it's for the kids!" There you go. 70 pigs and angry birds later the audience was grunting and oinking. For the kids, of course!

Enough of that, let's slingshot at the demos.

After the much beloved Swedish version of gamified sex – to promote safer sex practices - comes the American take on it. Planned Parenthood distributes free condoms with a QR code printed on the package. Aiming your mobile phone at it and it leads you to the Website Wheredidyouwearit.com. Here you post your experience like this here:

"A 40 something guy and girl whose relationship is all about love and have already talked about safer sex and STDs used a condom in a plane, train, or automobile to help the love last a little longer. It was ah-maz-ing – rainbows exploded and mountains trembled."

How do you highlight a new product without giving one of these product pitches, boring everyone to death? By creating a game and not showing the product at all. Hide the product, don't talk about it, distract the users from even seeing it. Sounds fishy? You betcha!

Not talking about SAPs new analytics platform is what SAP Marketing did to demonstrate the capabilities it. The mobile application Paul the Octopus (available on the iTunes-store), named after the famous octopus from Sea Life Center in Germany that predicted with 100% accuracy the outcome of the soccer world cup games, engages users by asking the to predict which team in the UEFA Champions League will win the upcoming matches. Thanks to the wisdom of the crowd, the prediction of the winning teams may be as accurate as well. Beside that, trivia quizzes and games played against your friends are part of the app as well.

For the past 18 months I have been dealing intensively with gamification. Back then in August 2010 I launched an SAP internal community around gamification, trying to understand how game mechanics and game design principles can be applied to something serious as business applications. The first months it seemed more conceptual research with an unclear outcome. Then came the first Gamification Summit in January 2011 organized by Gabe Zichermann, and since then the topic shot through the roof. The 400-500 search results that Google returned in August 2010, skyrocketed to over 3 million barely 18 months later.

For the whole 2011 I fought the skeptics. "We are doing serious business, we don't have time for fun at work", was a common argument against gamification. "We just loose time by creating a game out of business applications" another one. But more and more colleagues joined the SAP–internal gamification to the current high of 460+ and began to understand the details of gamification. It does not mean to create a game. It's not about badges and points. It can add real value.

And two events, the internal SAP Gamification Cup, and the InnoJam at the SAP TechEd Las Vegas with over 180 customers, partners and SAP employees creating gamified business application tipped the public enterprise opinion. The 25 examples created in both events, together with the more than 40 other gamified business examples from other areas at SAP, demonstrated the real and positive impact that the application of game mechanics and game design techniques can have on the interaction of users with enterprise software.