1,721,270 research outputs found
Bourget (P.) et Cattani (G.). Jules Hardouin- Mansart
No full textAubert Marcel. Bourget (P.) et Cattani (G.). Jules Hardouin- Mansart. In: Bulletin Monumental, tome 118, n°4, année 1960. p. 331
A Core/Periphery Perspective on Individual Creative Performance: Social Networks and Cinematic Achievements in the Hollywood Film Industry
Full text linkThe paper advances a relational perspective to studying creativity at the individual level. Building on social network theory and techniques, we examine the role of social networks in shaping individuals’ ability to generate a creative outcome. More specifically, we argue that individuals who occupy an intermediate position between the core and the periphery of their social system are in a favorable position to achieve creative results. In addition, the benefits accrued through an individual’s intermediate core/periphery position can also be observed at the team level, when the same individual works in a team whose members come from both ends of the core/periphery continuum. We situate the analysis and test our hypotheses within the context of the Hollywood motion picture industry, which we trace over the period 1992–2003. The theoretical implications of the results are discussed
Start with “Why,” but only if you have to: The strategic framing of novel ideas across different audiences
Full text linkResearch Summary: Building on social psychology research and entrepreneurship work on linguistic framing, we argue that the appreciation of novel ideas varies with the mental construal that members of different audiences use to evaluate them. Specifically, we theorize that the congruency between idea framing and audiences' mental construals depends on audiences' level of expertise in evaluating novel ideas. In four experiments, we found that innovators benefit from deploying framing strategies congruent with audiences' mental construals: novices (e.g., lay people, crowdfunders) appreciate more novel ideas framed in abstract why terms, while experts (e.g., professional investors, innovation managers) novel ideas framed in concrete how terms. Integrating the strategic framing of novel ideas with construal level theory and audience heterogeneity contributes to research on entrepreneurship, innovation, and impression management. Managerial Summary: One of the critical challenges that innovators (e.g., entrepreneurs) face is to persuade relevant audiences (e.g., users, crowdfunders, professional investors, and innovation managers) to support their novel ideas. This article integrates various literatures concerned with the evaluation of novelty to examine the impact of different framing strategies on the reception of novel ideas by different audiences. By demonstrating that the framing of a novel business idea affects audience members' evaluation, and that the effectiveness of different frames (why vs. how) varies with the target audiences (novices vs. experts), we offer actionable insights into how innovators can strategically use linguistic framing to increase the likelihood of eliciting favorable evaluations and resource commitment for their ideas
Fitness determinants in creative industries: A longitudinal study on the Hollywood film-making industry, 1992-2003
No full textIt is often overlooked that fitness is a multidimensional concept, and that its components are context-specific. The multifaceted nature of fitness is most evident in cultural/creative industries, because firms are confronted with the challenge of balancing seemingly conflicting needs: artistic performance and commercial imperatives have to be satisfied for long term survival. In this study we examine two important component-traits that make up the fitness function for the Hollywood motion picture industry, which we argue are human capital and network capital. Although many studies have recognized the critical role of 'creative' human capital - which is typically embedded in individuals and groups - and network capital - that is, inter-organizational networks - we do not have many studies that empirically analyze their complex relationships using large scale data sets. We situate the analysis within the period 1992-2003, one in which we have good data and the industry appears relatively stable and very productive. While still exploratory, our paper shows how such human capital and network resources interact with the structure of the industry and influence different dimensions of the fitness function. We show how the traits work differently on the different dimensions of fitness to create a dynamic tension between creativity and performance. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
Balancing Valued Tradition with Innovation
No full textSuccessful companies frequently face the challenge of updating a beloved old product. Italian opera companies face this dilemma every season. Many of the best-loved operas in the repertoire are more than 100 years old. The most devoted operagoers will have seen multiple productions of the same work and have a very clear, and usually conservative, notion of what constitutes a proper production. However, making no changes would limit opera’s contemporary cultural relevance. After interviewing 15 artistic directors of Italian opera houses and studying the ticket sales of 2,627 opera productions between 1989 and 2011, we found that the most successful opera houses strategically balance alterations to core and peripheral features of traditional operas across different customer segments. In so doing they address the need for renewal while at the same time remaining sensitive to the heterogeneity of their audience. The findings offer several actionable insights for successfully navigating the innovation tradition tradeoff that companies across many industries must routinely face
Radically concrete or incrementally abstract? The contingent role of abstract and concrete framing in pitching novel ideas
Full text linkEntrepreneurs pitching new ideas are hard-pressed to frame their message in the most compelling way to win the attention and support of relevant audiences. But could a simple shift in framing sanction the success or failure of their communication efforts? Drawing on recent scholarship on the recognition of novel ideas and language, we compare the effectiveness of two framing approaches to idea pitching: abstract vs. concrete framing. We suggest that the best framing strategy to rally audience support depends on the novelty of the idea. Two controlled experiments where we investigate the combined impact of an idea’s degree of novelty and the abstractness level (why vs. how) of the framing strategy used to pitch it on the idea’s evaluation by members of a lay audience (e.g. crowdfunders, students, or other non-professional evaluators) confirm our intuition. The findings indicate that radical ideas are significantly more likely to elicit favourable evaluation from lay audience members when those ideas are framed in concrete ‘How’ terms; whereas incremental ideas fare better when framed in abstract ‘Why’ terms. By focusing on the framing strategies that entrepreneurs can use to communicate their new ideas, our study contributes to the growing research on the role of language in shaping the recognition of novelty. More generally, it provides entrepreneurs with actionable insights that they can leverage to attract attention and support from a general (lay) audience
Balancing Valued Tradition With Innovation When your product is a beloved classic, how do you update it to attract new customers?
No full textSooner or later, most successful companies face the challenge of updating a cherished old product. Make no changes, and you risk becoming irrelevant to new customers. Change too much, and you may alienate your most loyal customers.
So how do you leverage a historically strong brand with sensitivity to heterogeneous customer preferences? To explore this question, we studied Italian opera companies, which face this dilemma every season. Many of the best-loved operas in the repertoire are more than 150 years old, and the most devoted operagoers have fairly traditional tastes. However, if opera companies hew to their preferences, they may limit their cultural relevance and fail to develop new audiences.
Our analysis of ticket sales for 2,627 Italian opera productions from 1989 to 2011, and interviews with 15 artistic directors of opera houses, yielded some insights into successfully managing the tension between tradition and innovation that can be applied by anyone with a beloved product they need to updat
Introduction to the Industrial and Corporate Change special issue on: “knowledge resources and the heterogeneity of entrants within and across industries
No full textBlending Novelty and Tradition in Creative Projects: How Robust Project Design and Conventionality Shape the Appeal of Operatic Productions.
No full textProjects are presented in the organizational literature as purposeful mechanisms to facilitate the combination of different resources and competences, manage tasks that are time limited and typically performed by a semi-temporary collection of individuals with heterogeneous expertise who collectively enable the host organization to transition from one state of performance to a new state (Lundin and Söderholm, 1995; Cattani et al., 2011). Firms have become increasingly reliant on projects to support the development of new and complex products precisely because firms generally find it difficult to combine the range of resources needed to fuel new product development processes (Gann and Salter, 2000; Brady and Davies, 2004; Manning, 2008). The creative industries provide many opportunities for the observation and analysis of such project-based forms of organizing (Castaner and Campos, 2002; DeFillippi, 2015). Indeed, the production of theatrical plays (Goodman & Goodman, 1976), movies (Ferriani et al., 2009), videogames (Ayoama and Izushi, 2003), music (Lorenzen and Fredriksen, 2005; Ordanini et al., 2008; Sedita, 2008), TV productions (Manning and Sydow, 2011); advertising (Grabher, 2004), are all typical examples of contexts where project-based organizing is the privileged organizing approach to address some of the key challenges associated to the development of new products.
Paramount among such challenges is how to establish legitimacy while simultaneously demonstrating novelty (Navis and Glynn, 2011). This challenge reflects two competing approaches on how to signal the value of a new product to the market. On the one hand, in their search for market success, firms must organize innovative projects that pique audience curiosity and generate excitement. On the other, they need to be ready to satisfy the expectations of audiences that “demand familiarity to understand what they are offered” (Lampel et al., 2006, p. 292). Even if novelty surprises, provokes and entertains audiences, it is understood and appreciated only with respect to the ‘familiar’ against which it is interpreted (Cattani et al., 2020; Keuschnigg, 2015; Slavich and Castellucci, 2016; Lampel et al., 2000). This tension is particularly acute in the creative industries, in which limited if no possibilities to acquire valuable market knowledge before and after each lunch exist, where a few hits dominate the market and in which consumers often treat variation as deviant (Phillips and Kim, 2009; Younkin and Kashkooli, 2020). Strategy and organizational scholars have suggested that firms can best address this tension by pursuing optimal distinctiveness that is, by choosing a position that is optimally poised between conformity to established expectations and distinctiveness to ensure that firms are “as different as legitimately possible” (Deephouse, 1999, p. 147; but see also Durand and Kremp, 2016; Zhao et al., 2017). Yet questions remain on how firms can configure their product development projects to pursue an optimally distinct market position.
We address these questions in the Italian opera industry, which we examine in light of recent work that has focused on the strategic choices that can be made to increase the reception of new products (Jensen, 2010; Cattani et al., 2017; Younkin and Kashkooli, 2020). Italian opera houses are non-profit companies that experience strong pressures to simultaneously conform to and deviate from an established tradition as they are expected to both introduce novelty in their programming strategies and capitalize on the audience familiarity with revered operatic material. As opera houses are project-based organizations, “where projects are represented by shows” (Mariani, 2007, p. 105), and where each staged opera is a new project that (re)interprets an existing opera, focusing on shows’ (project) characteristics and distinctive features allows us to examine how tradition and innovation combine in opera houses’ project design choices, and how these choices affect market appeal. To that end, we analyzed industry archives and conducted interviews with opera managers to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that shape operatic performance. We then used this understanding as a basis for developing and testing our theoretical arguments.
We argue that opera houses can achieve an equilibrium between novelty and conformity to tradition by pursuing what we term a robust project design strategy. A robust project design allows the framing of novelty in familiar terms through the design of “the particular arrangement of concrete details that embodies an innovation” (Hargadon and Douglas, 2001: 478). To bring this to the context under study, we contend that opera houses can offer revivals of past cultural projects that preserve what the target audience perceives as the most familiar aspects of a particular operatic tradition, while departing from that tradition on other more peripheral attributes. A robust project design strategy, in other words, allows firms to reconcile novelty and familiarity by pursuing innovation that remains within the boundaries of tradition. Additionally, we examine how the effectiveness of a robust project design strategy varies with the strength of the tradition associated to a particular opera, which we measure in terms of opera conventionality. By conventionality, we mean material that is the expression of a well-known operatic tradition (e.g., La Traviata, Madama Butterfly, etc.) and is performed very frequently because it appeals to a broad audience. As a result, even minor deviations from that tradition may elicit poor evaluation if not outright rejection. If instead the material is less conventional and so the target audience is less familiar with the original work (and therefore, has no clear expectations), project design strategies that cross the boundaries of tradition are more likely to be well-received. Accordingly, we suggest that the degree of opera conventionality moderates the effectiveness of a robust project design strategy: as the level of conventionality of the operatic material increases, the appeal of a robust design will decline because the target audience perceives the departure from tradition as being more salient.
We contribute to research on optimal distinctiveness (Deephouse, 1999; Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001; Slavich and Castellucci, 2016; Zhao et al., 2017) and novelty acceptance (Cattani et al., 2017; Hargadon and Douglas, 2001; Sgourev, 2013) by unveiling unexplored design choices through which firms may manage conformity and distinctiveness pressures, and improve the appeal of their product offering. Our finding that the conventionality of staged operas moderates the effectiveness of opera houses’ robust project design strategies sheds additional light on how firms should strategically balance between distinctiveness and conformity.
After illustrating some important features of the tension between novelty and familiarity in the opera industry and exploiting interviews with key informants that echo and give nuance to the notion of robust project design, we present our arguments on how conventionality moderates the effectiveness of a robust project design strategy. Next, we describe our research design, sample, variables and econometric models. After reporting the results, we conclude with a discussion of the contributions, implications and limitations of our study
- …
