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Purpose - This paper sets out to describe and illustrate an emerging shift in the conceptualisation of value creation in business, namely the emergence of value ecology thinking. Design/methodology/approach - This paper examines shifts in the understanding of value creation in key business, economic and innovation literature and focuses on developments in creative industries at the forefront of technology and innovation - film, TV, computer games, e-business, mobile phones - to illustrate how business increasingly creates value through ecologies. Findings - This paper identifies five important shifts in the conceptualization of value creation by highlighting a growing prevalence in the literature of several ecological metaphors used to explain business processes, namely: the shift from thinking about consumers to co-creators of value; the shift from thinking about value chains to value networks; the shift from thinking about product value to network value; the shift from thinking about simple co-operation or competition to complex co-opetition; and the shift from thinking about individual firm strategy to strategy in relation to value ecologies. Originality/value - This paper synthesizes emerging trends in the literature in relation to value creation and defines the concept of a value-creating ecology. In the process it sheds light on the structure of next generation business systems. Read more...

It has been demonstrated that users occasionally innovate. However, it can now be observed that even end-consumers act as a source novel product designs. A case study of a firm, and "its" consumers - from the computer games industry - illustrates how sourcing of consumer knowledge has enabled the firm to improve product design. Two conditions favor the results firms can obtain from consumer’s knowledge. First, is firm’s ability to exploit new opportunities of information and communication technology - on-line communities - to establish interfaces connecting them with consumers. Second, is firm’s ability to initiate a mode of organization by which the consumers are guided and motivated to reveal merely relevant knowledge. Read more...

In this paper we explore the interrelationship between technological progress and the formation of industry-specific skills by analysing the evolution of the video-game industry in three countries: Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We argue that the cross-sectoral transfer of skills occurs differently depending on national contexts, such as the social legitimacy and strength of preexisting industries, the socioeconomic status of entrepreneurs or pioneer firms in an emerging industry, and the sociocultural cohesiveness between the preexisting and emerging industries. Each country draws on a different set of creative resources, which results in a unique trajectory. Whereas Japan's video-game industry emerged out of corporate sponsorships in arcades, toys, and consumer electronics industries and drew skills from the comic book and animated-film sectors, the video-game industry in the United States evolved from arcades and personal computers. In the United Kingdom the video-game industry developed bottom-up, through a process of skills formation in the youth culture of 'bedroom coders' that nurtured self-taught programmers in their teens throughout the country. Read more...

Earth balls, parachutes, word plays, provocative magic ... This session is a discussion of the USC Game Design Community, an attempt to encourage inter-disciplinary game design and research through community play experiments. The USC Game Design Community is a cross-departmental student group responsible for initiating a series of social play experiments designed to bring students and researchers from various schools of the University together. The play experiments of the previous year culminated in a game innovation research grant offered to an inter-disciplinary student team and a test of our overall assumption that playing together can provide disparate groups with common vocabulary, social relationships and collaboratively generated design concepts. Read more...