The global competition for highly skilled people has led to increasing acceptance by organisations, as a key business strategy, of the need to retain and re-train their existing staff through some kind of tailored competence development that reduces the lead-time for a learner to achieve target productivity: the “time-to-competence” (TTC). The GaLA motivation stems from the acknowledgment of the potentiality of Serious Games (SGs) for education and training and the need to address the challenges of the main stakeholders of the SGs European landscape (users, researchers, developers/industry, educators).
Today, the main route to shorten TTC is a bespoke (hand-crafted) face-to-face or blended course, which tends to be resource-intensive (expensive to create and deliver). The main aim of the TARGET Project is to research, analyse, and develop a new genre of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) environment that supports rapid competence development of individuals, namely knowledge workers within the domains of living labs (innovation) and project management. 
GALA aims to shape the scientific community and build a European Virtual Research Centre aimed at gathering, integrating, harmonizing and coordinating research on SGs and disseminating knowledge, best practices and tools as a reference point at an international level.
The other key focuses of the project are: the support to deployment in the actual educational and training settings; the fostering of innovation and knowledge transfer through research-business dialogue; the development high-quality didactics on SG by promoting and supporting courses at Master and PhD level.
