Startups in Entertainment: Exporting More Than Movies

• In Event: Startups, Innovation, Technology, and the Entrepreneurship Economy

Abstract

This is the era of global startups. What began in Silicon Valley has been reproduced around the world through the dis-embedding and spreading of structures, institutions and practices that create disruptive and highly innovative organizations. Giddens calls these larger societal shifts episodes—such as the move from an industrial to an information or network society (see Castells, 2001). Giddens claims that an episodic characterization delineates large-scale sequences of actions and events that change society by both enabling and constraining actors and changing institutions (Giddens, 1984). This grant-funded comparative project examines start-up companies in the entertainment industry in Shanghai, China and in Los Angeles, California United States.

Leaders in these new organizations need to create a vision of the future to share with investors and to attract new employees to the venture—they need a compelling story that captures their innovation and their ability to make sense of the becoming of their organization. At first communication and knowledge sharing is relatively simple because the number of employees is small. However, as Leonardi (2015) has noted, an organization's ability to help employees share knowledge is directly related not just to its continued innovativeness, but to its ability to grow, and to attract and retain top talent.

The goal of this study is to understand how leaders and members of new enterprises in the entertainment and cultural industries create a compelling vision of the future, grow their organizations through both storytelling and knowledge sharing, communicating strategically with internal and external stakeholders and customers, and utilize communication technologies such as social media to enhance innovation and find financial and creative success. As organizations struggle to grow in a challenging global landscape, it is important to illuminate the underlying tensions in the discourse between leaders and members. By focusing on the processes of envisioning, networking, information sharing, communicating expectations, using social media to promote the brand, etc., the project intends to make communication visible inside start-ups and to examine the emerging alignments and misalignments in the culture of the entertainment startups. By comparing organizations in China and the US, additional knowledge of the global appropriation of startup culture can be examined through contextual enablers and constraints that will further explicate the generative mechanisms of start-up patterns.

The methodology includes interviews, observations, and surveys in both Chinese and English. In addition, social media data will be collected to investigate elements of the vision, the spread of the brand and strategic use of social media in the development of communication capacity by utilizing semantic network analysis. Other methods may be added if needed following the assessment of the interview data.

Authors

• Patricia Riley, U of Southern California

• Grace Yuehan Wang, U of Southern California

• Yiqi (Iona) Li, U of Southern California - Annenberg School for Communication

• Jingyi Sun, U of Southern California

• Kristen Guth, U of Kentucky

• Sierra Bray, U of Southern California - Annenberg School for Communication