Digital creatives and digital engineers: entrepreneurial firms, institutional context, and the organization of innovation

Abstract The comparative capitalisms literature has developed an increasingly dynamic approach to conceptualizing capitalism variety, and has suggested mechanisms to explain shifts in institutional practices under the surface of formal stability of the institutional context. Less is known, however, about how new entrepreneurial firms engage with institutions to develop organizational arrangements needed to support their innovation activities. Such engagement with institutions can represent sources of heterogeneity within and across national institutional contexts, with incremental changes in practices resulting, in some instances, in major transformations in institutions over time. We draw on a study of fifty-three independent mobile games firms in the USA and Japan and the structures and processes used by these firms to develop innovative activities in their institutional context. Our research advances our understanding of organizational diversity and institutional change in two ways. First, our study identifies two new ‘variants’ of how entrepreneurial firms organize their innovation activities in their institutional context—digital creatives and digital engineers. Second, we characterize the mechanisms through which entrepreneurial firms engage and respond to institutions that support the establishment of these variants—defecting, intensifying, and positioning vis-à-vis large firms.