Blending Novelty and Tradition in Creative Projects: How Robust Project Design and Conventionality Shape the Appeal of Operatic Productions.

Projects are presented in the organizational literature as purposeful mechanisms to facilitate the combination of different resources and competences, manage tasks that are time limited and typically performed by a semi-temporary collection of individuals with heterogeneous expertise who collectively enable the host organization to transition from one state of performance to a new state (Lundin and Söderholm, 1995; Cattani et al., 2011). Firms have become increasingly reliant on projects to support the development of new and complex products precisely because firms generally find it difficult to combine the range of resources needed to fuel new product development processes (Gann and Salter, 2000; Brady and Davies, 2004; Manning, 2008). The creative industries provide many opportunities for the observation and analysis of such project-based forms of organizing (Castaner and Campos, 2002; DeFillippi, 2015). Indeed, the production of theatrical plays (Goodman & Goodman, 1976), movies (Ferriani et al., 2009), videogames (Ayoama and Izushi, 2003), music (Lorenzen and Fredriksen, 2005; Ordanini et al., 2008; Sedita, 2008), TV productions (Manning and Sydow, 2011); advertising (Grabher, 2004), are all typical examples of contexts where project-based organizing is the privileged organizing approach to address some of the key challenges associated to the development of new products. Paramount among such challenges is how to establish legitimacy while simultaneously demonstrating novelty (Navis and Glynn, 2011). This challenge reflects two competing approaches on how to signal the value of a new product to the market. On the one hand, in their search for market success, firms must organize innovative projects that pique audience curiosity and generate excitement. On the other, they need to be ready to satisfy the expectations of audiences that “demand familiarity to understand what they are offered” (Lampel et al., 2006, p. 292). Even if novelty surprises, provokes and entertains audiences, it is understood and appreciated only with respect to the ‘familiar’ against which it is interpreted (Cattani et al., 2020; Keuschnigg, 2015; Slavich and Castellucci, 2016; Lampel et al., 2000). This tension is particularly acute in the creative industries, in which limited if no possibilities to acquire valuable market knowledge before and after each lunch exist, where a few hits dominate the market and in which consumers often treat variation as deviant (Phillips and Kim, 2009; Younkin and Kashkooli, 2020). Strategy and organizational scholars have suggested that firms can best address this tension by pursuing optimal distinctiveness that is, by choosing a position that is optimally poised between conformity to established expectations and distinctiveness to ensure that firms are “as different as legitimately possible” (Deephouse, 1999, p. 147; but see also Durand and Kremp, 2016; Zhao et al., 2017). Yet questions remain on how firms can configure their product development projects to pursue an optimally distinct market position. We address these questions in the Italian opera industry, which we examine in light of recent work that has focused on the strategic choices that can be made to increase the reception of new products (Jensen, 2010; Cattani et al., 2017; Younkin and Kashkooli, 2020). Italian opera houses are non-profit companies that experience strong pressures to simultaneously conform to and deviate from an established tradition as they are expected to both introduce novelty in their programming strategies and capitalize on the audience familiarity with revered operatic material. As opera houses are project-based organizations, “where projects are represented by shows” (Mariani, 2007, p. 105), and where each staged opera is a new project that (re)interprets an existing opera, focusing on shows’ (project) characteristics and distinctive features allows us to examine how tradition and innovation combine in opera houses’ project design choices, and how these choices affect market appeal. To that end, we analyzed industry archives and conducted interviews with opera managers to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that shape operatic performance. We then used this understanding as a basis for developing and testing our theoretical arguments. We argue that opera houses can achieve an equilibrium between novelty and conformity to tradition by pursuing what we term a robust project design strategy. A robust project design allows the framing of novelty in familiar terms through the design of “the particular arrangement of concrete details that embodies an innovation” (Hargadon and Douglas, 2001: 478). To bring this to the context under study, we contend that opera houses can offer revivals of past cultural projects that preserve what the target audience perceives as the most familiar aspects of a particular operatic tradition, while departing from that tradition on other more peripheral attributes. A robust project design strategy, in other words, allows firms to reconcile novelty and familiarity by pursuing innovation that remains within the boundaries of tradition. Additionally, we examine how the effectiveness of a robust project design strategy varies with the strength of the tradition associated to a particular opera, which we measure in terms of opera conventionality. By conventionality, we mean material that is the expression of a well-known operatic tradition (e.g., La Traviata, Madama Butterfly, etc.) and is performed very frequently because it appeals to a broad audience. As a result, even minor deviations from that tradition may elicit poor evaluation if not outright rejection. If instead the material is less conventional and so the target audience is less familiar with the original work (and therefore, has no clear expectations), project design strategies that cross the boundaries of tradition are more likely to be well-received. Accordingly, we suggest that the degree of opera conventionality moderates the effectiveness of a robust project design strategy: as the level of conventionality of the operatic material increases, the appeal of a robust design will decline because the target audience perceives the departure from tradition as being more salient. We contribute to research on optimal distinctiveness (Deephouse, 1999; Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001; Slavich and Castellucci, 2016; Zhao et al., 2017) and novelty acceptance (Cattani et al., 2017; Hargadon and Douglas, 2001; Sgourev, 2013) by unveiling unexplored design choices through which firms may manage conformity and distinctiveness pressures, and improve the appeal of their product offering. Our finding that the conventionality of staged operas moderates the effectiveness of opera houses’ robust project design strategies sheds additional light on how firms should strategically balance between distinctiveness and conformity. After illustrating some important features of the tension between novelty and familiarity in the opera industry and exploiting interviews with key informants that echo and give nuance to the notion of robust project design, we present our arguments on how conventionality moderates the effectiveness of a robust project design strategy. Next, we describe our research design, sample, variables and econometric models. After reporting the results, we conclude with a discussion of the contributions, implications and limitations of our study.