From Individual Consumption to Venture Development: the Role of Domain Passion in the Videogame Industry
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From Individual Consumption to Venture Development: the Role of Domain Passion in the Videogame Industry Elena Casprini 1 & Tommaso Pucci 1 & Gino Vitale 1 & Lorenzo Zanni 1 Received: 29 June 2018 / Accepted: 17 June 2019/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract This paper explores how individual domain passion influences venture development. Albeit passion is one of the most debated concepts in psychology, entrepreneurship and marketing literatures, a framework describing how passion for consumption shapes the entrepreneurial process is still lacking. Based on an inductive qualitative approach, the paper addresses these issues via analysing an Italian and a Japanese videogame companies. The paper provides two important contributions to existing research. First, it shows that obsessive and harmonious passion influence venture growth strategies through what we call a ‘passion-fulfilling’ and a ‘passion-orchestrating’ venture development models. Second, it sheds light on the role of contextual factors in shaping passion. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. Keywords Obsessive passion . Harmonious passion . Venture development . Videogame
Introduction When thinking about our infancy, most of us do remember their first experience with videogames. Probably too, most of us do also still enjoy or think with nostalgia about iconic videogames such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy. Nonetheless, it is surprising thinking about the fact that there are 2.2 billion gamers worldwide (Global Games Market Report 2017) and that the entire videogame market has generated $108.9 billion dollars in 2016. What is even more surprising is that, in the realm of the videogame industry, often the passion in consuming videogames is also the driver of entrepreneurial activity. As a recent example, we can cite the case of Game Deal Daily, an ecommerce store founded few years ago by the young start-upper Matt
* Elena Casprini [email protected]
1
Department of Business and Law, University of Siena, piazza S. Francesco 7/8, 53100 Siena, Italy
Journal of the Knowledge Economy
Friel who, starting from his own passion on games, is today running a $3.4 million yearly company (Pofeldt 2016). Broadly understood as ‘a strong inclination or desire toward an activity that one likes’ (Thorgren et al. 2014), passion has been one of the most debated concepts in many fields of research such as psychology and human behaviour (Baum and Locke 2004; Lafrenière et al. 2009; Lavigne et al. 2011), marketing and consumer research (Belk et al. 2003) and entrepreneurship (Cardon et al. 2013; Cova and Guercini 2016; Drnovsek et al. 2016; Milanesi 2018). There is no doubt that passion is a heterogeneous concept. Passion may vary in terms of intensity and types (Forest et al. 2011; Lavigne et al. 2011), be a driver of consumption (Albert et al. 2013; Belk et al. 2003), and influence entrepreneurial activities (Cova and Guercini 2016; Drnovsek et al. 2016). However, although the i
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