How and where the R&D takes place in creative industries? Digital investment strategies of the book publishing sector^*

* Preliminary versions have been presented at the XII International Conference on Arts&Cultural Management (AIMAC), 26–29 June 2013, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá (Colombia), at the XI International Conference TripleHelix, 8–10 July 2013, Birkbeck and UCL, London and at the XXIV International Conference on Strategic Management (AIMS), 3–5 June 2015, Dauphine University, Paris.

ABSTRACT

The innovative and strategic models of creative industries (CIs) in the digital economy are capturing an increasing interest in recent years. Yet, most of the literature deals with creation and talent and very little with technological and innovation perspectives. Innovation is in general considered from a single viewpoint: a means to develop new creative contents. This article investigates an important issue that has been surprisingly neglected in scientific literature and public reports: the topic of R&D and technological innovations in CIs. The article characterises how and where R&D takes place in the book publishing industry. A systematic identification of R&D developments concerning e-book technology has been achieved using an original methodology set up to feature the technological strategic evolutions. The results provide a reliable cartography of the value chain through an adaptation of the open systems interconnection layers model. This framework helps to understand the new digital ecosystem of the book publishing sector and the strategies carried out by the editorial houses.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative industries
• publishing industries
• R&D
• value chain
• e-book

Acknowledgements

This research has been carried out thanks to the financial support of the Centre National du Livre (CNL), Paris.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Pierre-Jean Benghozi is Research Director at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Professor at Ecole polytechnique (Paris, France). He developed, since the early 1980s, a pioneering research group on Information Technology, Telecommunications, Media and Culture. Co-Chairman of AIMAC, the largest international Conference for Art and Culture Management, he is also board member of scientific committees in highest French institutions and numerous international scientific conferences and academic journals. His competencies made him nominated commissioner and member of the executive board of the French national regulatory authority for electronic communications and postal services (ARCEP).

Elisa Salvador holds an international PhD in Institutions, Economics & Law from the University of Turin (Italy). She has worked for the Italian National Research Council (CNR) on several projects focused on innovation policies. She won the CNR award ‘Promotion of Research 2005’ for her project ‘The financing of research spin-offs: an analysis of the Italian case'. She has recently collaborated with the Polytechnic of Turin, with the Chaire Entrepreneuriat as well as with the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherche Amérique Latine-Europe of the Business School ESCP-Europe. She is currently an Associate Researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and she is Adjunct Professor at Iéseg School of Management, Economics and International Business Economics tracks.

Notes

* Preliminary versions have been presented at the XII International Conference on Arts&Cultural Management (AIMAC), 26–29 June 2013, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá (Colombia), at the XI International Conference TripleHelix, 8–10 July 2013, Birkbeck and UCL, London and at the XXIV International Conference on Strategic Management (AIMS), 3–5 June 2015, Dauphine University, Paris.

1 For example, for the qualitative ones: Benhamou (2015), Bhatiasevi and Dutot (2014), Flew and Cunningham (2010), Harper (2011), Hotho and Champion (2011), Jaw, Chen, and Chen (2012); for the quantitative ones: Bettiol and Sedita (2011), Bohnenkamp et al. (2015), Chaston, Sadler-Smith (2012), Muller et al. (2009), Parkman, Holloway, and Sebastiao (2012).

2 Compare Industry & Innovation, 2008, special issue: Managing Situated Creativity in Cultural Industries; International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2009, special issue: After the Creative Industries; Innovation: Management, Policy and Practice, 2009, special issue: Innovation Policy in the Creative Industries; Organization Studies, 2012, special issue: Misfits, Mavericks and Mainstreams: Drivers of Innovation in Creative Industries; Technological Forecasting and Social Change, special section: Digital Technology and the Creative Industries: Disassembly and Reassembly, 2014; International Journal of Arts Management, special issue: Financing Creativity: New Issues and New Approaches, 2014; Technological Forecasting and Social Change, special section: The Creative Economy in Global Competition, 2015.

3 For example, CBI (2014), Davy (2007), Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (2003), HKU (2010), KEA (2006), Roxane (2014), Santagata (2009), SGS (2013), UNCTAD (2010).

4 Compare, in particular, the Special Issue ‘Innovation Policy in the Creative Industries' (Innovation: Management, Policy and Practice, 2009).

5 The famous André Malraux, at that time French ministry of culture, characterized in the 60s the film industry as a prototype industry, considering esthetical originality as the main source of inventiveness. Nonetheless, the main disruptive technological innovations in the CIs have always taken place outside these industries. This was the case for sound movie (invented by General Electric in the early XXth), for the disruptive devices like Walkman or CD (created by Philips or Sony before they entered into the media industry), and, more recently, for the MP3 and Appstore in music.

6 The concept of hidden innovation is deepened and contextualized to the book publishing industry in Section 5.2.

7 This makes this sector a more suitable case study compared to other high-tech CIs calling for heavier technological investments like cinema or video-games.

8 Stoneman (2010, 23–24) focused extensively on innovation in CIs and ‘product aesthetics': he defined soft innovation as ‘the introduction of any new aesthetic product or product variant [or] aesthetic innovations in industries the output of which is not aesthetic per se but functional'.

9 Compare Australia (SGS 2013), Canada (Davy 2007); New Zealand (Foundation for RST 2003); the UK (CBI 2014; Green, Miles, and Rutter 2007); France (PIPAME 2012); Austria (Muller, Rammer, and Trüby 2009); France and Europe (Roxane 2014).

10 These reports document and value the size and role of the creative economy at national or local level, they evaluate its pivotal economic contributions through the provision of some statistics on a number of creative sectors, and assess that creativity is essential to workforce investment and economic development strategies.

11 For instance, the deep analysis of all the main features of the different e-reader versions helped out to identity the precise technologies that influenced the competitive characteristics of these e-readers. The technologies have been investigated in details and catalogued in various groupings. These groups revealed, in particular, how several specific technologies have been introduced for ink and display characteristics development, for light and quality image improvements, for sound property ameliorations and for features of augmented e-books.

12 A representative list of examples of e-readers and tablets is provided in Appendix.

13 The attention towards e-books and digital reading increased conspicuously when Sony released its e-reader Librié in 2006 in the US market and Amazon launched the Kindle e-reader with its online sales mechanism in 2007, followed by Barnes and Noble with its Nook e-reader in 2009.

14 The social media interest in the book publishing sector is exemplified by the Facebook's purchase of book app developer Push Pop Press and the partnership with Kobo and NetFlix (Guiry et al. 2012).

15 It is interesting to highlight the emergence of a new strategy of building relationships with consumers-readers: the way of buying books is now personalised and readers are followed after having bought a book through their active involvement and interactions on the social networks. Digital bookshops, publishing-related community blogs, social media and social networking sites are emerging as key tools for attracting new clients and fostering the diffusion of e-books (Carreiro 2010; Tian and Martin 2010).

16 Elaborated by Green, Miles, and Rutter (2007) and by Miles and Green (2008), the concept of hidden innovation (not-R&D-based innovations) clearly accounts for this perspective. It refers to the fact that a significant group of firms develops innovations spontaneously and with creativity, without performing formal R&D activities: for example, Barge-Gil, Nieto, and Santamaria (2011) explored the role played by non-R&D activities that can, anyway, lead to innovation, meaning technology forecasting, design, use of advanced technologies and training. They found that non-R&D activities are critical factors in explaining a company's product and process innovations.