Communities of Innovation at the Ubisoft Montréal’s Studio

With over 2,000 employees, Ubisoft Montreal’s studio is the largest video game development office in the world. Established in 1997 by the French-owned multinational group Ubisoft (one of the world’s leading video game developers and publishers), the studio quickly became a creative flagship. It successfully launched many blockbuster games (over 5 million units sold), which became powerful brands for series development on consoles and other platforms (e.g. Prince of Persia, Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry), and developed franchised games with strong consumer impact (e.g. Peter Jackson’s King Kong or James Cameron’s Avatar). Like many creative organizations with multiple projects, the studio fits the description of a project-led organization (Hobday, 2000), with a portfolio of approximately 15–20 projects in parallel. The projects are managed through a “classic stage-gating process,” which implies some very strong sets of creation, conception and production routines very well assimilated by project team members. Each project is independent and the project manager literally acts as a semi-autonomous entrepreneur, under local control of the studio’s president and under the ad hoc and remote control of the marketing and creative department from the headquarters in Paris…