Trade Economics Department's Lecture

Theme：Growing Pains: The Effect of Generational Product Innovation on Mobile Games Performance

Speaker：Liang Chen（The University of Melbourne）

Time：2019-09-19 10:00

Address：Room 1008, Mingde Business Building

Language：English

ABSTRACT:
Strategy research advises that firms need to capture the generative value spawned from own innovations by continually introducing generational improvements on their existing products. In this paper, we question the net performance effect of such generational product innovations. We argue that generational innovation may elicit a negative response from existing customers, as it distorts their ingrained behavioral patterns and imposes additional learning costs. Further, we propose that this negative effect of generational innovation is weakened for incumbents that have a leading market position, and it is amplified for products that have experienced more generational changes. Using a difference-in-differences design based on mobile game apps that multihome on two platforms, we find supportive evidence for our hypotheses and discuss implications for strategy and technology innovation literature.

SHORT BIO：
Liang Chen is Senior Lecturer in Management at the Department of Management and Marketing, The University of Melbourne, Australia. He received his Ph.D. from the Centre for International Business at the University of Leeds. His recent research examines competition, innovation and internationalization in the digital economy, with a particular focus on platform ecosystems as a new organising structure.