Developing lean competencies through serious games

Lean Production is a methodology largely implemented across industries and services. This methodology adds value to companies, as it derives from the main idea "doing more with less", where less means with fewer resources, less product development time, less human effort, among others to provide high performance in daily activities. As a company requires adequacy of Lean Thinking, the philosophy behind Lean Production, it leads to a concern in the manner of training and educating of its employees. Lean Thinking requires competencies to be successfully understood and pursued all the time. Partly due to human and social capital being key factors for the functioning of society and economy, in recent years there has been an increased interest in competencies, as knowledge and skills are not enough anymore. In this context, higher education engineering and innovative organizations seeks to complement the training of theirstudentsandprofessionals, through specific courses with serious games simulating typical day-to-day issues in business matters. The serious games methodology involve “learning by doing”, in which students can develop and improve skill sets in real-world context,
recognizing themselves as protagonists of their learning. Experiential learning or “learning by doing”, does notonly implyexposition of the theory, but the resolution of an unstructured problem, it also proposes decision-making to solve such a problem. Thus, the Lean Thinking mind-set needs serious games and other active learning methodologies to become
truly meaningful and to provide new competencies to the professional. This mind-set is a valuable differential in the current market, with increasingly flexible job rotations, more on-demand jobs than long-term contracts, and its demand of skills incompetitions, like quick learning and logical reasoning. This articlediscussesthe importance of serious games for Lean students and professionals to acquire competencies. The research was, predominantly, based on a conceptualreview of papers that described serious games and hands-on activities. Based on these, some evidence elements from the papers that match essential competences of Lean Education: System-thinking, Environment and Ethics were collected.