Acceso usuarios
Chidi Oguamanam
The Nigerian movie industry, known as Nollywood, has attracted an impressive degree of research interest since its debut in the 1990s, resulting in a dedicated transdisciplinary research niche called Nollywood studies. Nollywood is situated as disruptive of historic and contemporary African movie culture, underscoring Nollywood's significance as a phenomenon ?fundamental to Africa's self-representation.? In this study, we examine Nollywood in relation to its collaborative model of innovation, its unique form of openness and other factors implicated in its creative diffusion as a phenomenon across Africa and its diaspora. We also explore Nollywood's emergence as an unexpected creative force in the world of entertainment. The study evaluates the evolutionary interface between technology and entrepreneurship as a dynamic process in the progress and transformation of Nollywood. Complementing the issue of technology, as a factor in Nollywood's evolution, the study identifies a complex aggregation of other factors, including culture, ethnicity, marketing and entrepreneurial ingenuity, liberal art infrastructure and Nigeria's abundant social capital and how they have coalesced to put entertainment alongside oil and agriculture as one of the highest employers of labour and as a surprising dispenser of economic oxygen in Africa's most populous country and its largest economy. Our starting premise is that Nollywood owes its evolution to technological innovation and many unexplored contextual contingencies. The study also identifies and examines forms of openness in Nollywood, within and outside of existing paradigms, and how they factor into the industry's success. Nollywood operates in a fluid borderline between formal and informal frameworks. In Nollywood, a pragmatic and evolving approach to intellectual property systems and openness reflects aspects of its unique business model with contextual sensitivity and, in a way, advances its transnationalisation, albeit counter intuitively. Nollywood represents a grassroots indigenous entrepreneurial cultural initiative. Our project provides insights into the scalability potential of the Nollywood phenomenon and its cross-sectoral ramifications for innovation and entrepreneurship on the African continent. The study applies a combination of methodological strategies aimed at eliciting, reifying and drawing substantively on industry practitioners? voices and perspectives. It taps into stakeholders? mastery, institutional history, and knowledge of Nollywood's evolution and its modus operandi.
