Title: Essays on Organization, Creativity, and Globalization
Description: This dissertation examines an underexplored type of innovation - the discovery of new resources. Schumpeter distinguishes among five types of innovation: new products, new processes, new organizations, new markets, and new resources. Most prior work has focused on the first three types of innovation. This study focuses on the last type of innovation, the discovery of new resources, in creative industries where talent is the most important resource of creativity and profit. This dissertation is comprised of three chapters. Each of the chapters examines a strategy or an environmental change such as unbundling, digitalization, and cross-border acquisition which may facilitate or weaken the discovery of new talent and experiment with new artists. In the first chapter, I explore the impact of unbundling on the discovery of new talent. The results highlight the trade-off between breadth-oriented experimentation (experimenting with more new alternatives by producing unbundled products) and depth-oriented experimentation (collecting more accurate information on fewer alternatives by producing bundled products) and suggest that unbundling may facilitate firms’ breadth-oriented experimentation and the discovery of new talent.

In the second chapter, I investigate whether digitalization (digital market) facilitated the discovery of new talent by entrepreneurial firms. Digitalization offers diverse niche opportunities from a long-tail market and decreases the cost of experimenting with new artists. However, the findings from this chapter suggest that entrepreneurial firms did not benefit from such opportunities; iTunes and YouTube did not facilitate entrepreneurial firms’ discovery of new talent and experimentation with new artists (compared to incumbent firms). In the third chapter, I turn to look at the impact of foreign ownership or capital on the discovery of new domestic talent. The “liability of foreignness” argument suggests that foreign ownership may weaken the discovery of new talent from the host country because foreign owners may lack a good understanding of the host country culture. This study analyzes the case of Sony’s acquisition of CBS Records (a US major label) in 1988, which is the first merger by a Japanese firm with a firm of a distant culture.

The results suggest that Sony did not undermine CBS Records’ discovery of domestic new talent but instead increased the popularity of new domestic artists in CBS Records and its subsidiaries.