Co-evolutionary dynamics and institutions: Innovation in a guild community in Norway

ABSTRACT

The video game industry is often portrayed as a ‘footloose industry’ in which electronic goods can be produced and distributed from any location without positive or negative effects from factors such as resources or proximity to market. Hence, a conventional assumption is that the role of place is greatly diminished in the case of such industries. The author tests this assumption by analysing firms’ practice in a game developer community in Bergen, Norway, and the spatiality of linkages between the community and the environment. He proposes an alternative analytical framework for understanding practice in the industry, one that recognizes that a firm's practice is either embedded within or related to networks and institutional structures. The question of how contextual conditions, embeddedness and networks are treated in the literature on innovation is discussed, and the concept of community as an analytical concept is introduced and applied. After showing how practice in the case community has evolved within the cultural, social and territorial context, the author concludes that a portrayal of the game industry as a ‘footloose industry’ disembedded from its surroundings should be avoided, and instead the dynamic relationship between actors, context and practice should be heeded.