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In terms of continuity, the fundamental underlying strategic views in Nin-
tendo's cognitive frame could be traced back to the company's history as a toy
manufacturer and the previous president Hiroshi Yamauchi. These included
e.g. deeply held values and resource allocation oriented towards discontinu-
ous product attributes dif erent from those established in the market.
At the same time, there were also discontinuous elements present within
Nintendo that altered the process whereby innovations were recognized
and selected. When Nintendo changed presidents on March 31, 2002, it
marked a shift from a more authoritarian-based decision-making style to
one in which the opportunity recognition of the Wii emerged out of an
interpretative conversation among managerial experts within the company.
These expert-based group conversations provided a means to facilitate
refl ection and to support intuitive-based experiences that shaped the direc-
tion of the Wii. Historically specifi c market conditions for Nintendo in the
video game industry were also providing an incentive for the company to
pursue the path of discontinuous product attributes. The perceived value of
the opportunity for discontinuous innovation was enhanced by the gradual
decline of the Japanese market and Nintendo's gradually declining market
shares, interpreted by Nintendo's senior management as a sign of declining
returns of improvement in established product attributes.
Nintendo's cognitive frame could guide the company in its ef orts to
make the higher-order structural relationships to use new technology in a
non-obvious way. As the case study of the Wii suggests, Nintendo's cogni-
tive frames shaped the consoles innovation process in at least four ways in
the creation, retention and selection phase (outlined in Table 8.2).
First, Nintendo's cognitive frame of the nature of interactive entertainment
provided a set of underlying ideas that could guide the company in assessing
when existing product attributes were reaching diminishing returns, thereby
supporting a questioning of existing heuristics in the Wii's development.
Second, Nintendo's cognitive frame supported the continued search
ef orts in areas that were not yielding immediate results. It was, e.g. a
time-consuming and repetitive ef ort to interpret how the experiential user
interface of the game controller could be changed. This is consistent with
studies that have found that opportunities of performance attributes that
are based on intuitive cognition require a lengthy interpretative process of
experimentation to fi nd support for their value (Lester and Piore 2004).
This is likely due to the relatively slowly changing intuitive cognitive system
compared to the rapidly changing analytical one (Hodgkinson et al. 2009;
Dane and Pratt 2009; Salas, Rosen and DiazGranados 2010).
Third, by having an established cognitive frame of the perceived gen-
eral underlying principles of games entertainment value, Nintendo could
experiment extensively with ideas and prototypes in areas that were seen
as interesting, without the existence of a directly commercially applicable
technology in the area. When emerging technology provided new opportu-
nities, Nintendo could reuse conceptual ideas and knowledge of previous
experimentation, as evident in the development of the Wii's controller.
 
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