Innovation approaches and innovation logics: An empirical study on developing entertaining digital games

Abstract

This paper sets out to analyse how game developers create entertaining digital games and, more precisely, what forms of innovation approaches they adopt and why. Based on an empirical study of Swedish game development studios, we conceptualize two different approaches to innovation: a more inward‐oriented and developer‐centric (i.e., closed) approach and a more outward‐oriented and user‐centric (i.e., open) approach. Given that the firms in this study are acting under similar contingencies while adopting very different innovation approaches, we introduce innovation logics as a theoretical concept to understand how founders and managers justify their choice of approach (i.e., open vs. closed). Inspired by the ‘orders of worth’ framework by Boltanski and Thévenot, we highlight two distinctive innovation logics—that is, a creative logic versus an iterative logic—that the interviewees draw on. This paper contributes to the open innovation literature by highlighting two forms of innovation approaches and explaining how and why they differ in terms of ‘openness’ in relation to the surrounding ecosystem.