Lessons from the creative industries: institutions, recurrent change and advantage

Abstract

This dissertation presents a new view on strategy with three interrelated studies exploring how avant-garde leaders in creative industries create sustainable advantages from creativity, recurrent change and innovation especially when under high pressure from imitating rivals due to the lack of barriers for imitation. Study I comprises a field study at avant-garde leader Studio X in service design, which explores how members develop new routines on their flagship project with Dubai Airport, following a wider creative ethos to outdo former work with every project. Innovation is routine, and during this 18-month participatory study I observe how members routinely curate and leverage slack on core projects to invest in further adaptation and experimentation. This ability to continuously innovate and cannibalise previous practices is rooted in, paradoxically, routines of recurrent change, which are part of collective beliefs members follow to distance themselves from imitation. Study II suggests a theoretical framework for advantage based on broader observations in fashion, which captures how leaders coordinate privileges in exclusive clubs to dictate taste and charge premium prices. Members enjoy market-straddling positions that permit status transfer strategies from exclusive markets to more accessible ones, with the objective to charge accessories with high symbolic value. In other words, celebrities an stars wearing exclusive evening gowns on red carpets linked with the same label as perfumes an sunglasses, charges the latter with high symbolic value. Through close relations with key institutions in the field, such as schools, museums and fashion press for example, fashion houses accredit and validate their designs, and therefore enjoy competitive advantages through steady premium prices, even their products get quickly imitated. In Chapter III, I conduct a participatory study combined with field interviews to analyse how service design leader Studio X responds to new challenges arising from imitators in management consulting. Because of their superior skills, these entrants threaten the firm’s position as exemplary firms by shifting the meaning of the category. I observe how the avant-garde leader embraces its creative imperative to fight imitation with novelty by embracing a multi-level transformation process. As a result, the firm attempts to distinguish itself from its followers by highlighting its art-inspired heritage as design firm, sharpening its identity and mimicking features typical of these new entrants, and by doing so, aims to protect its core positioning and what service design comes to mean.