Serious games provide an attractive alternative to traditional innovation techniques for both participants in the innovation process: technology producers and technology consumers. Whether or not producers and consumers behave like innovation partners, or even realize they are engaged in this partnership, innovation does require at least two participants to play. In the best of all possible partnerships, there is a smooth collaboration between the two players, but, as you'll discover in this issue of Cutter IT Journal, this often this isn't the case.

If we had to give advice to college graduates in the year 2020, what would we tell them they need to know to be an effective technology worker or an effective business user of technology? This Cutter IT Journal issue presents five wide-ranging, insightful articles on the possible technological, management, and business skills that executives, managers, and workers in organizations (private and public sector, large and small) will need in the 2020-2025 timeframe as a result of the ceaseless improvement in information systems and their core technologies. Not a client? Download a complimentary copy of this report in PDF format.

This is CBR's ninth annual IT trends issue. For nearly a decade we've gathered and analyzed data across a broad range of IT topics: analytics, IT spending, hiring and outsourcing, IT's role in innovation and value creation, social media, mobile computing, the cloud, security, and so on. Like all issues of CBR, each IT trends issue gives you an up-to-the-moment look at the "vital signs" of the industry. But more importantly, because we are able to look at how signs change over time, every year each IT trends issue just keeps getting smarter and smarter.