Bridging organisations are understood to play an important role in National and Sectoral Systems of Innovation (Freeman, 1987; Lundvall, 1993; Malerba, 2002) and Technological Systems (Carlsson and Stankiewitz, 1995) particularly in compensating for weaknesses in these systems, such as access to suppliers of technology, information, finance etc. However, to ensure their role is fulfilled we need to know more than we do currently about the organisational practices which make them effective. Furthermore, we need to develop theory on why and where they are needed. This paper will show how a public bridging organisation designs and manages an effective intervention through analysis of a complete sample of entrepreneurs participating in a series of ‘business clinics’, co-ordinated by the bridging organisation on behalf of the electronic games industry in the UK. It will show that this globally regarded creative industry has some weaknesses and conservative tendencies, which threaten its capacity for radical or disruptive innovation. It will show how bridging organisations can compensate for these weaknesses. The UK electronic games sector is renowned for the creativity of its content. However, the games Sectoral System of Innovation (SSI) has a number of weaknesses. Firstly, the UK no longer has domestically owned global publishers. Publishers play the important roles of financing games development, as well as co-ordinating their marketing and distribution. To most of the UK industry’s independent developers they are distant and elusive (Spectrum-Strategy-Consultants, 2002; TerKeurst, 2003; Grantham and Kaplinsky, 2005). Secondly, within a SSI certain types of innovation trajectory may be favoured at the expense of others. The dominant games trajectory is essentially greater processing power and photo-realistic graphics, with proven content in terms of franchises and movie tie-ins. The more radical propositions are unlikely to get a serious hearing from publishers. This creates a sector-wide “ Innovator’s Dilemma” (Christensen, 1997) where sustaining innovation trajectories of technical advance with rising costs are favoured at the expense of disruptive innovation- newer, cheaper technologies and ideas aimed at new markets. The more creative and potentially disruptive ideas in the games industry are those that tend to overlap with other SSI. For example mobile phone games are emerging at the boundary of the games and mobile telecommunications SSI. In the SSI literature boundaries are thought to be dynamic, rather than fixed, and involve interdependencies between related sectors (Malerba, 2004:14; Edquist, 2004). Convergence may result in new sectors emerging from older established ones (Mowery and Nelson, 1999). But during the emergence there are institutional weaknesses in the areas of overlap. Bridging organisations can mitigate the problems caused by these areas of weakness. Our study reports on a regional bridging organisation’s intervention. The process involved entrepreneurs presenting their business propositions to a panel of industry experts for validation, refinement or rejection. We analyse the nature of the propositions and the impact of the intervention on them, identifying key design and process choices. We show how bridging capabilities can respond to and compensate for weaknesses in SSI in emerging industries, drawing on the entrepreneurship and disruptive innovation literatures. Read more...

The following paper analyses the relationship between the modding community and the games industry from a political economy perspective, without disregarding the pleasures and rewards individual modders may derive from their work. Within this context, the questions of whether modders can be regarded in terms of a "dispersed multitude", and how the power that comes with this status can be realised more fully, deserve special attention. At the same time, this paper seeks to gain insight into the changing relationship between work and play in the creative industries, and the ideological ramifications of this change. Read more...

In the light of the increasing amount of poor and mediocre software that proliferates in the computer and video games industry, this paper extends a previously described framework for the application of Quality Function Deployment in games development. The results from a study involving gamers and industry experts reveal subtle yet important differences between various aspects of rally-game design for different categories of gamer. The methods provide developers with systematic approaches with which to manage and tailor the development process for different gamers, using the so-called Voice of the Customer and views of experts, thus helping to improve quality and company reputation. Read more...

This paper explores the implications and uptakes of game developers’ increasing reliance on the creative labour of fan content creators. It draws on an ethnographic account of Australian game developer Auran’s increasing reliance on train and rail fans in the process of developing Trainz: a train and railroad simulation. I argue that this is not simply a case of the exploitation of unknowing fans as a source of free labour. This research demonstrates that gamers are not only well aware of these practices; they are also sophisticated practitioners who participate in them. These complex entanglements of the proprietary and the non-proprietary, the commercial and the non-commercial, are not necessarily an appropriation of fandom by corporate bottom-line agendas. However, Auran’s effort to integrate fan content creation into the commercial game development process struggles with the problem of fundamentally reorganising the project to support this kind of collaborative work. Read more...