Impact of Success on Creativity and Resource Management: Three Essays on Bollywood

Two prevailing reasons make studying creative industries valuable to strategy scholars: these industries are economically significant, and they offer theoretical insights into competition and strategy beyond the boundaries of the creative industries themselves. This dissertation develops a better understanding of creative industries and utilizes this setting to inform strategy research on creativity and resource management, outlines the implications for policy and practice, and earmarks areas that merit future work. The first chapter provides an overview, then the second chapter lays the foundation for the investigation by introducing the setting—the Hindi Film Industry, Bollywood. It qualitatively and quantitatively highlights both the unique and generic features of Bollywood. In particular, it introduces the unique attributes of Bollywood that facilitate empirical investigations into creativity: the art form and its measurement of success. It then elaborates upon traits Bollywood shares with other creative industries, namely, the resource-intensive and network-based production.The third chapter addresses the question: Does success diminish creativity? This remains one of the greatest puzzles in the study of creativity because there are powerful arguments on both sides of the question. Using novel measures of creativity and success, I identify the causal impact of success on subsequent levels of creativity. I find that creativity decreases after success. My results show that above all else, success enhances popularity and enables more popularity seeking. Consequently, creativity decreases disproportionately more for those who trade off creativity to popularity. The fourth chapter addresses the question: How do managers transform resources to create value? This study advances our understanding of resource-based theory by empirically testing the factors that drive a manager’s ability to acquire and leverage resources. I show that managers with connections to film families/dynasties in Bollywood exhibit resource enrichment following a successful project. Also, while film family managers leverage the available resources in order to focus on quality, high-performing managers not related to film families are focused on the product’s mass appeal.