In September, Associate professor Birthe Soppe from DIGENT participated in the Paper Development Workshop on Organizational Stigma at the IESEG Business School in Paris. She presented the paper “A horse of a different color: How entrepreneurs use design and location to overcome stigma by association“, developed with her co-authors Raissa Pershina, PhD student at DIGENT/UIO and Santi Furnari, Professor at Cass Business School London.

The paper is a qualitative case study about Atari, an entrepreneurial firm founded in the 1970s and the inventor of the first modern video game product called coin-op video games, which kickstarted the coin-op video games industry. At that time, Atari’s products were highly associated with the stigmatized pinball-amusement industry. The paper investigates how Atari and its founder Nolan Bushnell engaged in efforts to overcome this stigmatization throughout the early years of Atari’s emergence.