Micro-studios Meet Convergence Culture: Crossmedia, Clustering, Dialogues, Auto-communication

From Innovation Systems to Cross-innovations

“…Despite these challenges, the specifics of small markets are that domestic returns and growth opportunities are limited and, therefore, orientation to servicing international markets is commonplace in online service innovation. This has already been evidenced in studies of Nordic AV and cross-media entrepreneurs (Ibrus, 2016). As will be seen in the subsequent chapters, this is again the case with firms working on cross-innovation projects in smaller countries.…”

“…If innovation is a combination, as Schumpeter put it, we need to ask how the combinations come about. Our proposition, articulated before by Ibrus (2015aIbrus ( , 2016, is that for a combination of different perspectives of knowledge domains to happen, a dialogue is needed À a dialogue across the existing boundaries of social or cultural sub-systems. As in the example described in Chapter 1, a dialogue between the engineers of the Internet and telecommunications industries first happened that enabled T-Mobile in Europe to eventually come up with a solution that would make websites accessible on mobile devices À a solution facilitating the convergence of mobile and desktop webs and as such creating a new 'rule' of device-agnostic or multi-platform web.…”

“…This example also indicates how the dialogue as such is paradoxically also the first instance of auto-communication À the participants in the dialogue articulate their connection, their shared 'rules', that is, then communicate about them, establishing an 'us-ness', a joint identity. It has been demonstrated (Ibrus, 2015a(Ibrus, , 2016 how media innovations emerging at the meeting points of different industry sectors facilitate their convergence as the social structures that produced them start working auto-communicatively. To explain the concept, auto-communication as introduced by Lotman (1990) refers to the situation where the messages produced address the communicating institution itself, its identity, its boundaries and distinctions (see also Christensen (1997, p. 202), Morsing (2006, p. 175) and Broms and Gahmberg (1983)).…”

“…What the learning from cross-media (or transmedia, as these phenomena are functionally similar) studies should be is that the emergence of a new form or innovative media phenomenon does not mean that the parallel or previous phenomena or institutional setting may disappear. This refers, on the one hand, to the 'convergence paradox' (Ibrus, 2016;Liestøl, 2007) that it results in divergence À emergence of a new form next to others, a process that results in the pluralisation of cultural forms. On the other hand, it means that media forms stay related and that media industries, to neuter the risk of audience fragmentation, develop complex strategies to meaningfully connect them.…”

The replacement of media policies with (media) entrepreneurship policies: A view from Europe’s periphery

“…Yet, as we have demonstrated (Ibrus et al 2013;Ibrus and Ojamaa 2014;Ibrus 2016), these initiatives suffer from structural constraints that limit the growth of media SMEs in small peripheral countries. For instance, we have observed how the existence of such funding schemes often becomes an important stimulus for the generally underfunded film sector and is therefore eagerly used.…”