Prof. Dr. Cornelia Storz (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Program

• Date: 30.06.2011
  Time: 09:30 - 11:00
  Location: Room 211, Ludwigstr. 28, Front Building

Labour Markets and Innovation: A Cross-Country Comparison in the Game Software Industry

This paper focuses on the effects of labour market structures on innovation. The game industry is an interesting case since it is structured differently between the best performing countries, contrasting to the expectation that innovation is in need of open labour markets. This raises two issues: Why can different patterns of labour markets be observed? How do they affect innovation? We first introduce contrasting approaches on the systematic relations between the structure of labour markets and the dynamics of innovation. We secondly present an empirical case which is based on mixed methods: The analysis of the individual market mobility was depicted from the product credits of 20.944 games created from 1977 to 2009 for home consoles and personal computers. Among these games we selected a random sample of 1183 titles (and computed diversity measures of the career experience of their creators (a total number of 39.439 individuals) in terms of number of different development companies they have worked for from 1977 to 2009. This research is supplemented by field research.