Serious games: leverage for knowledge management Caroline Bayart, Sandra Bertezene and David Vallat University of Lyon 1, Lyon, France, and Jacques Martin Universite ´ du Sud Toulon-Var, La Garde, France Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate if the use of “serious games” with students can improve their knowledge acquisition and their academic performance. Design/methodology/approach – The research is an exploratory investigation resorting to the use of a serious game to evaluate the evolution of the students’ competencies in project management, through questionnaires processed using a structural “learning model.” Findings – This research shows indeed that the use of “serious games” improves the knowledge acquisition and management competencies of the students with the evidencing of significant factors contributing to this improvement. Practical implications – The findings of this research show that serious games can be an effective tool to be used in teaching students particularly as traditional methods are less and less accepted by today’s students. Originality/value – Although the use of games is not something new in education, it is still limited in teaching practices in higher education. This experiment can help lecturers and trainers to resort to them in their pedagogy and to conceive them according to variables that can enhance their effectiveness. Keywords Knowledge management, Knowledge acquisition, Serious games, Student competency improvement Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction The knowledge worker, whose main activity is to think (Davenport, 2005), is a key actor of the economy of knowledge (Drucker, 1959; Foray, 2009), itself at the heart of economic growth (Arrow, 1962; Romer, 1994). This is all the more true today as we witness the development of Creative Common licenses (guaranteeing at the same time copyright and free circulation; Lessig, 2004) or that of massive open online courses, MOOC (Friedman, 2013). Knowledge feeds innovation and labor productivity (Powell and Snellman, 2004; OCDE, 2012a, b), hence the interest of firms and organizations to invest massively in knowledge (OCDE, 1996, 1999, 2000; Wilson and Briscoe, 2004). Knowledge and its corollary education are the pillars of competitiveness in the framework of international competition (World Economic forum, 2012). The role of education and more particularly of universities consists in helping students in their apprenticeship so that they become knowledge workers. What teaching methods can be used to achieve this goal? In order to give some answers to this question, we have chosen to evaluate the nature of the impacts of a serious game on the acquisition of knowledge by students. If serious games have attracted attention in previous research, essentially qualitative (Malone, 1981; Eber, 2003), this research does not allow to identify and understand the mechanisms according to which they influence the process of acquisition of knowledge (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2007; Wilson et al., 2009). This paper presents a stage in the research to test the different techniques by professional publics. The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1754-2731.htm The TQM Journal Vol. 26 No. 3, 2014 pp. 235-252 r Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1754-2731 DOI 10.1108/TQM-12-2013-0143 235 Serious games