Small businesses in the new creative industries:innovation as a people management challenge

Purpose - This paper presents findings from an SME case study situated in the computer games industry, the youngest and fastest growing of the new digital industries. The study examines changing people management practices as the case company undergoes industry-typical strategic change to embark on explorative innovation and argues that maintaining an organisational context conducive to innovatin over time risks turning into a contest between management and employees as both parties interpret organisational pressures from their different perspectives. Design/methodology/approach - A single case study design is used as the appropriate methdology to generate indepth qualitative data from multiple organisational member perspectives. Findings - Findings indicate that management and worker perspectives on innovation as strategic change and the central people management practices required to support this differ significantly, resulting in tensions and organisational strain. As the company moves to the production of IP work, the need for more effective duality management arises. Research limitations/implications - The single case study has limitations in terms of generalisability. Multiple data collection and triangulation were used to migitate against the limitations. Practical implications - The study highlights the importance of building up change management capability in the small businesses typical for this sector, an as yet neglected focus in the academic iterature concerned with the industry and in support initatives. Originality/value - Few qualitative studies have examined people management practices in the industry in the context of organisational/strategic change, and few have adopted a process perspective

"We are always after that balance":managing innovation in the new digital media industry

The pressure to innovate is growing as technology cycles change more rapidly. Organisations need to balance exploration and exploitation effectively if they are to heed the innovation imperative. Organisational ambidexterity is proposed as a means to achieve such balance with structural or contextual ambidexterity as possible choices. Yet how organisations become ambidextrous is an as yet underresearched area, and different industry sectors may pose different innovation challenges. Using the case study method, this paper examines how a computer games company responds to an industry-specific innovation challenge and how it endeavours to balance exploration and exploitation. The findings suggest that ambidexterity is difficult to achieve, and is fraught with organisational tensions which might eventually jeopardise the innovation potential of a company. The paper suggests that more qualitative research is needed to further our understanding of innovation challenges, innovation management and organisational ambidexterity

Gaming Business Communities: Developing online learning organisations to foster communities, develop leadership, and grow interpersonal education

This paper explores, through observation and testing, what possibilities from gaming can be extended into other realms of human interaction to help bring people together, extend education, and grow business. It uses through action learning within the safety of the virtual world within Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Further, I explore how the world of online gaming provides opportunity to train a wide range of skills through extending Revans’ (1980) learning equation and action inquiry methodology. This equation and methodology are deployed in relation to a gaming community to see if the theories could produce strong relationships within organisations and examine what learning, if any, is achievable. I also investigate the potential for changes in business (e.g., employee and customer relationships) through involvement in the gaming community as a unique place to implement action learning. The thesis also asks the following questions on a range of extended possibilities in the world of online gaming: What if the world opened up to a social environment where people could discuss their successes and failures? What if people could take a real world issue and re‐create it in the safe virtual world to test ways of dealing with it? What education answers can the world of online gaming provide

Back to the Future: Economic Self-Organisation and Maximum Entropy Prediction

This paper shows that signal restoration methodology is appropriate for predicting the equilibrium state of certain economic systems. A formal justification for this is provided by proving the existence of finite improvement paths in object allocation problems under weak assumptions on preferences, linking any initial condition to a Nash equilibrium. Because a finite improvement path is made up of a sequence of systematic best-responses, backwards movement from the equilibrium back to the initial condition can be treated like the realisation of a noise process. This underpins the use of signal restoration to predict the equilibrium from the initial condition, and an illustration is provided through an application of maximum entropy signal restoration to the Schelling model of segregation

Designing multiplayer games to facilitate emergent social behaviours online

This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence 'state' changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer 'bumper-car' style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations

Social Energy - A New Form of Perceiving Capital in Postmodern Economy

The presented paper deals with the issue of social creation of knowledge in the postmodern economic order. The concept of beneficients as a core idea of this conception in connection with thermodynamic analogy in interdisciplinary problem leads to the materialistic and intellectual dual analysis of sustainable phenomenon of development and creation of knowledge. The paper discusses the possibility of a new way of development of institutional economy in the direction of knowledge economy and the change in an approach to an organisation from the traditional systemic to a cooperating community. The presented considerations are a germ of intellectual infrastructure and supporting the process of structural learning and sustainable development with artificial intelligence. It has been suggested that social energy should be considered as an alternative way of perceiving development.entropy, social complex systems, postmodern economy, econophbysics, multiagent economy

Mapping and analysis of the current self- and co- regulatory framework of commercial communication aimed at minors

As the advertising sector has been very active in self-regulating commercial communication aimed at children, a patchwork of different rules and instruments exist, drafted by different self-regulatory organisations at international, European and national level. In order to determine the scope and contents of these rules, and hence, the actual level of protection of children, a structured mapping of these rules is needed. As such, this report aims to provide an overview of different categories of Alternative Regulatory Instruments(ARIs,such as self- and co-regulation regarding (new) advertising formats aimed at children. This report complements the first legal AdLit research report, which provided an overview of the legislative provisions in this domain.status: publishe

Creating a corporate anti-doping culture: Understanding the role of sport governing bodies

The World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) vision to promote a new moral order in sport and new forms of organisation and management through the World Anti Doping code (WADC) amount to creating a new corporate culture. WADC’s emphasis on policy implementation places sport governing bodies (SGB) and managers at the heart of the enterprise. This represents a double challenge: (i) to the organisational culture of SGBs as it entails creating shared systems of meaning that are accepted, internalised, and acted on at every level of an organization, and (ii) to the IOC and the WADA in regard to universality and particularity, where the general organisational difficulty is how they are to operate at a global (universal) level whilst such apparently intractable differences exist at the particular (local) level. This paper employs Morgan’s (1997) metaphor of organisations as cultures to develop an understanding of the process of endorsing a global anti-doping policy. It explores the enactment of the WADC using the Bulgarian Weightlifting Federation as a case in point. While a good level of universal approval of WADC has been achieved the main issue remains how to get SGBs practices in line with it

Agent-Based Modelling of O ensive Actors in Cyberspace

© Cran eld University 2021. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright owner.With the rise of the Information Age, there has also been a growing rate of attacks targeting information. In order to better defend against these attacks being able to understand attackers and simulate their behaviour is of utmost importance. A recent approach of using serious games provides an avenue to explore o ensive cyber attacks in a safe and fun environment. There exists a wide range of cyber attackers, with varying levels of expertise whose motivations are di erent. This project provides a novel contribution in using games to allow people to role play as malicious attackers and then using these games as inputs into the simulation. A board game has been designed that emulates a cyber environment, where players represent o ensive actors, with seven roles - Cyber Mercenary (low and high capability), State-backed (low and high capability), Script Kiddy, Hacktivist and Counter-culture (not motivated by nances or ideology). The facilitator or the Games Master (GM) represents the organisation under attack, and players use the Technique cards to perform attacks on the organisation, all cards are sourced from existing Tools, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs). Along with the game, players also provided responses to a questionnaire, that encapsulated three individual dif ferences: Sneider's self-report, DOSPERT and Barratt's Impulsiveness scale. There was a total of 15 players participating in 13 games, and three key groups of individual di erences players. No correlation was identi ed with the individual Technique card pick rate and role. However, the complexity of the attack patterns (Technique card chains) was modulated by roles, and the players' individual di erences. A proof-of-concept simulation has been made using an Agent-Based Modelling framework that re-plays the actions of a player. One of the aspects of future work is the exploitation of the game data to be used as a learning model to create intelligent standalone agents.PH

Teacher competence development – a European perspective

This chapter provides an European perspectives on teacher competence development