• Business Week, Thursday, June 14, 2007 11 AM

Are we trending towards the virtual office? That may depend on how IBM's latest experiment goes. Forget Second Life, IBM is producing something called Innov8, a virtual world video game that could best be described as "Second Office." And it's coming soon, according to a movie-trailer-like video promotion spotted on YouTube. It looks like Innov8 is striving to be the ultimate training tool, used to help tech managers better understand the various responsibilities taken on by a business leader, such as running a call center, operating a brokerage account, or processing an insurance claim.

The game's primary purpose is to educate with just a dash of entertainment. The program will be available free of charge to universities around the world, both on the Web and as desktop software. Corporations of course will have to pay something.

IBM thinks big things are afoot with virtual gaming: Innov8 is one of several related initiatives, including an intra-IBM competition called "War of the Worlds," which encourages employees to start virtual businesses or meet with real-world clients and conduct meetings in virtual worlds like Second Life. Members of the winning team receive a Nintendo Wii. Why not use an internal promotion to determine the best ways to leverage virtual worlds? IBM obviously thinks the skills honed playing massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft can be useful to the world of managing multinational corporations -- it also claims to have the research to prove it.

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