Learning from Strategic Activities: A Study of Video Game Development
Jamal Shamsie, Feichin Ted Tschang, Vivek Tandon · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2018
While learning from esperience has been well established for many aspects of a firms’s operational activities, it is not clear how this may apply to the firm’s strategic activities. Learning from strategic activities is likely to be much more challenging because these are undertaken less frequently and can show considerable heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose that firms can benefit from their experience if they break down their broader strategic activities into narrower categories. We apply this to product development activities in the video game industry by breaking these down into replication, adaptation and focus. Our results show that the quality of the firm’s offerings can improve when its experience is broken down into such specific forms. More generally, we demonstrate that firms can benefit from experience when they make deliberate choices about the more fine-grained categories of strategic activities that they choose to pursue.