Paper info

ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATIVENESS AND COOPETITION STRATEGIES USED BY VIDEO GAME DEVELOPERS

Patrycja Klimas and Wojciech Czakon

The paper was published at the 32nd IMP-conference in Poznan, Poland in 2016.

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Collaboration with rivals is widely viewed as a way to achieve superior performance of firms (Le Roy & Czakon 2015). Prior research has focused on the impact of coopetition strategies on: innovation (Gnyawali & Park 2009), strategic innovation (Robert & Yami 2009) but mostly on technological (Bouncken & Kraus 2013) or product (Robert & Hamouti 2013) innovation. Recent empirical studies move beyond establishing a positive relationship between coopetition strategies and innovation performance, in order to identify moderating effects such as: market uncertainty, network externalities and competitive intensity (Ritala 2012). All in all, our understanding of innovation as an outcome of coopetition is growing. However, the inverse relationship is far less explored. Our study aims at explaining the impact of organizational innovativeness on coopetition use. In order to capture this relationship we examine the Polish video game industry. Creative industries (Taylor 2012) and video games in particular are fast growing by intertwined economic and technological innovations (Teipen 2008). We use innovativeness as a concept broader than merely technology or product-related (Parmentier & Mangematin 2014), involving many dimensions (Wang & Ahmed 2004: Dobni & Klassen 2015). We adopt a multidimensional approach to organizational innovativeness, which includes four dimensions: strategic innovative focus, openness in communication, extrinsic motivation system, and management encouragement (Pallas et al. 2013). We collect data through a survey administered to all developers in the Polish video game industry. We run correlation, bivariate and multivariate regression analyses. Our data support a positive impact of one dimension of organizational innovativeness only on coopetition. This study contributes to coopetition theory by indicating that innovative organizations look for novel strategies.