An intensive three‐week introductory course within Aalto University's International Design Business Management (IDBM) graduate program emphasizes the role of social and cultural context in design, characterized by ambiguous, open‐ended, complex environments. It teaches students that design is more than a simple matter of Post‐it Notes and double‐diamond diagrams. Universities worldwide continue to attempt to integrate “design methodologies” into their curricula. What happens when non‐designers take their newfound knowledge into the messy real world?

With the proliferation of technologies and digital platforms, contemporary game development firms’ value propositions have become more complex. While on a global scale a considerable share of the game industry’s revenue is captured by a few dozen firms, we are also witnessing the emergence of local and regional hotspots. In this context, legitimacy is of utmost importance if new competitive advantages are to become institutionalized as an industry. This paper extends studies which have offered temporal snapshots to the regional or local formation of game industry by focusing on the Finnish context. The concept of resilient values is introduced as legitimizing how the game industry is shaped and how the values are interpreted to develop the industry further. Our findings suggest legitimacy is intertwined with resilient values, thus resulting in the industry evolving over time through three different stages: (1) incubation period, (2) growth phase, and (3) institutionalized legitimacy.