The Argentina Innovation Lab is working on the edge of the proven, on the border of the organizational comfort zone. We try out stuff that looks risky, or even outright silly, to see if it works for Greenpeace. We do that in our “backyard” in Latin America – in our own walled garden so to speak.
If something bombs and we fail with a new tool or method (and we anticipate to fail frequently) it is mostly our problem here. We bury the project, learn from it, share the learnings internally, and move on. If something takes off and shines, we share that, too, and offer other national and regional Greenpeace offices to come on board, join what we do or help them set up their own version of it.
Since mid-2011 we’ve been working on Games for Greenpeace. We’ve developed a manual with game scenarios and concepts, case studies from the field, and a bit of academic foundation background material, and are developing a social game for Facebook. We are also working on a cooperation project for crowd-sourced gamified forest monitoring, and are organizing a regular “Games Summit” hackathon to develop new game concepts with volunteer game designers.
In 2012 we added Open Innovation to our arsenal; we are preparing an innovation challenge on renewable energy that will launch in 2013.
We’re happy to hear from you, give us a shout at iboltz@greenpeace.org with questions and comments, to exchange ideas on games or open innovation, or anything else that’s not business as usual. 
A copy of the games manual is available here, and a copy of our strategy brief on open innovation here (though you need a Greenpeace Greennet Intranet account to access them). The 2012 activities report is here.
The Argentina Innovation Lab and Digital Mobilisation Lab operate independently, but we have a close working relationship because, after all, there’s no time to lose.
