Patrik Ström

Enmeshed in Games with the Government Governmental Policies and the Development of the Chinese Online Game Industry

The policies and regulations of governments affect the online game industry in a variety of ways, especially in countries with extensive state involvement and a low degree of transparency in the economy. This article examines the influence of governmental policies on the development and operation of online games in China. The stance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) toward online games has been influenced by three aspects of state policy: (a) information control, (b) technonationalism, and (c) social fears/pragmatic nationalism. CCPs specific policies toward the online game industry were put forward by CCP ministries and the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) as a response to the economic potential and increasing influence of the rapidly growing online game industry in China. The interaction of these different policy fields has had complementary and contradictory elements shaping their implementation.

Services, innovation, employment and organisation: research gaps and challenges for the next decade

This paper provides a critical analysis of European service research. The paper reviews the state of service research in 1991 and critically evaluates the subsequent two decades of academic research. The paper then identifies key research challenges that must be addressed over the next decade. The key issues identified include: the development of new conceptual frameworks; the creation of new metaphors that might supplant the dominance of the networking metaphor; research that would explore the production of translocal distributed co-produced service expertise; further work on embodied expertise/labour; research on services and manufacturing; modifications to national statistics and a critical analysis of the relationship between knowledge and business, and professional services.

Dynamic regional competitiveness in the creative economy: can peripheral communities have a place?

This article makes a contribution to the debate on regional economic development based on the increasing importance of the knowledge-driven or creative economy. The empirical data stems from research conducted on the structure of the creative economy in Sweden, where the results point to a few areas of importance for the concentration of the creative class. The results are compared with Canadian studies that reflect similar economic development patterns. The article seeks to contribute to the understanding of these results in a peripheral economic geographical context. The article argues for caution in applying the same kind of policy recommendations for urban and peripheral regions based on the analysis of the creative class.

Internationalisation of Japanese professional business service firms

This paper explores the internationalisation of Japanese professional business service (PBS) firms. The UK was chosen as the geographical area of study due to the large number of Japanese foreign direct investments over the last 20 years. A comparative study of Japanese and Western service providers was conducted in the UK in spring 2002 to ascertain if there are any significant differences in their ways of doing business with Japanese clients. The preliminary results show that Japanese firms tend to be very small in the UK in terms of both size and market share. They seem also to be tightly connected with Japanese businesses operating in the UK.

Japanese Professional Business Services: A Proposed Analytical Typology

This paper explores certain characteristics of Japanese professional business services (PBS). The aim is to develop an analytical typology consisting of the three dimensions – organizational linkage, service market, and competitive situation – for analysing the obtained empirical data. This typology has been developed in order to increase the understanding of how Japanese companies operate within this sector and also to examine the reasons behind the fact that Japanese business services seem to be marginalized in an international context. This typology could serve as a theoretical frame for comparing Japanese companies with western companies in future research. This research is based on empirical material collected in Japan in the spring of 2001, covering research institutes, general trading houses and insurance companies. Using the constructed analytical typology, the findings reveal that strong organizational linkages have generated a business service market where diversification of service supply within companies is common. However, there are strong indications of a changing business environment with increased competition and further specialization among business service firms. Furthermore, the findings indicate that Japanese companies have difficulties competing with highly-specialized and reputable  western business service firms.

A conceptualization of the product/service interface: Case of the packaging industry in Japan

In the globalized economy, companies compete on their value-added service offer. Japanese firms have a long tradition of outstanding manufacturing quality. However, the Japanese service industry is less developed in comparison with other OECD countries. Services have often been bundled together with products or internalized in manufacturing firms without separate visibility. We argue that this service bundling can be highly valuable in certain industries where there is a need to increase the service content. The paper uses the interface between product and package to show the potential strengths of the Japanese firms in terms of increasing value-added service in the value-chain. It offers a theoretical contribution to the discussion on the service economy and gives empirical examples from an industry in Japan.

Internationalisation of the Korean online game industry: exemplified through the case of NCsoft

Companies from Korea have become leading actors in the rapidly growing global online game market, being a knowledge and creativity intensive industry. The development of the industry raises a number of questions of the internationalisation process of companies in the intersection of creative- and technology-intensive industries. Co-evolution with user groups also requires interpretation and linkages to knowledge of local user preferences, creating additional challenges in the internationalisation strategy, through the product-service interaction. This paper explores the internationalisation efforts of the Korean online game industry through a case study of the country’s leading online game company.

Digital oases and digital deserts in Sub-Saharan Africa

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate whether Sub-Saharan African countries are catching up with the rest of the world in terms of online usage. Online service usage is an important component of the discourse of the “digital divide”, an emblematic term for the inequality of information and communication technology access. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is a quantitative analysis of internet and Facebook penetration coupled with economic strength (GDP/capita), literacy and degree of rural population. Findings – The findings reveal a heterogeneous pattern with a few African countries being digital oases and close to European levels, whereas the majority of the countries are still digital deserts. A strong correlation is found between economic strength and internet penetration. A generalist picture that Sub-Saharan is on the trajectory of closing the digital divide is an imprecise reflection of the reality. Research limitations/implications – It is argued that instead of measuring supply-side da...

Online Service Providers: A New and Unique Species of the Firm?

This chapter discusses Online Service Providers (OSPs) and gauges whether they can be defined as a new and unique species of the firm. It is concluded that OSPs have many typical features such as their intermediary role, the dependence on network effects, and a capacity to grow rapidly across borders via the online medium, but that there are few features that distinguish them as a unique species. Yet, it is argued that the intertwined social relation with end-customers, often in co-development milieu combined with the lack of a direct monetary relationship, could be one such unique feature. Therefore, an important challenge, particularly for countries in the global South, is to construct and implement policy frameworks in order to ensure that OSPs and the people using them are embedded in a dynamic but fair environment.

Concluding Remarks on Asian Inward and Outward FDI; New Challenges in the Global Economy

In this volume we have attempted to give a broad overview of the current scholarly debate around foreign direct investment (FDI) in emerging Asian countries, in which the main message has been to demonstrate that FDI flows — inward and outward — continuously take new directions, and change form incessantly. Despite several decades of multifaceted and successfully carried out research on FDI in different parts of the world — an endeavour that has broadened and deepened our knowledge of the complexities of international economic and political integration — reality has constantly impinged. Emerging market multinational enterprises feature new logics, and their activities are anchored in different institutional environments compared to the traditional firms, and demand accordingly new theoretical interpretations and explanations. The emerging market multinational enterprises should never be seen as a homogenous group, neither should companies from different Asian countries be scrutinized with the same glasses. Yet, there are indeed common aspects that motivate joint examination in the search for better explanation of past trends and enhanced predictability and probability of alternative future scenarios. The revealed heterogeneity between newly created multinational companies in various large emerging markets can also be seen as an appropriate starting point for the theoretical debate on intra-variations vs inner variations in the comparison with MNEs from the ‘old industrial core’ countries (for a recent successful example, see, for example, Williamson et al., 2013). It also raises the discussion of how and to what extent those companies increase competitive pressures, and one therefore needs to better understand the implications these pressures have on strategic development by competitors in Europe, Asia and in the rest of the world (for a recent publication, refer, for example, to Dolles, Alvstam and Strom, 2013).