Proposal of Playful Innovation for Decision Making in Savings Cooperatives. The Case of Ecuador

Although theory helps to lay firm foundations on business cooperative development, practices based on bottom-up actions and adaptation to new forms of interaction through telematic platforms catalyze the manifestation of situations that can positively affect the participation of members, employees and customers in companies. To this must be added the processes of formation, training and consolidation of human capital that allow the empower-ment of participation techniques centered on the experi-ence of the member as the central actor of the cooperative process, giving the role it deserves on the primacy of peo-ple in relation to capital. Hence, the contributions that can be generated by the participation of members through formative games facilitate the simulation of realities that are incorporated to feed back the information that is pro-vided by the members to the decision makers. Therefore, the applications of mobile devices, social networks or the cooperatives’ own web pages combined with the games help to become “centers” for gathering information, which allow managers to obtain specific data for decision-making from a democratic, educational and formative per-spective of the members, thus having better information, accurate planning, strategy proposals and management of the common good.