Gonna need more information than that. My question: according to his research, what actions is it of the producer that positively affects revenue and which actions of his negatively affect it?

You raise excellent questions Ferdinand. Dr. Mollick's data does not provide sufficient detail as to the actions producers took or could take to influence the revenue of the games published. However, he does draw attention to the work of others Burgelman (1991) described as viewing "middle managers as the agents of selection, while innovative managers serve as sources of variation, generating the ideas from which 'suits' select" (Mollick, 2012: 26). Mollick continues to write "innovators may still be the source of all new game ideas and concepts, but since the managers decide which ideas are actually allocated resources, it is the managers' selection that is ultimately measured in the model."

The suggestion that producers have more influence on the revenue of a game because of "selection ability" is speculative given the constraints of the data collected. Mollick concedes "designers are not merely sources of variation, but also, by necessity, are responsible for part of the selection process as well...that differences in middle managers themselves, and not just their selection role in the internal ecology of particular firms, explains part of the variation in performance" (Molick, 2012: 26-27).

Later in his article Mollick (2012: 27) notes that is may be that producers help designers "whittle down" the ideas of a designer to be able to generate a realistic project plan with more capable managers being better at translating game design into reality. It may also be through motivating team members. Other research has offered evidence for the importance of managers ability to facilitate creativity (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006).

The model used to examine the differences across firms, producers and designers is quite novel and an appropriate given the research question, but the model does include data to differentiate between any meaningful differences between the producers or designers on the projects other than the individual's title. The empirical approach did control for team size, year of the release date, game genre as cataloged on MobyGames, the number of games published by the publisher of the game prior to the year of the game's release, and whether the game was a sequel and licensed game. Producers accounted for 22.3% of the variation in revenue while 7.4% of the variation was explained by designers.

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Burgelman R. 1991. Intraorganizational ecology of strategy making and organizational adaptation: Theory and field research. Organization Science 2: 239-262

Hargadon A, Bechky B. 2006. When Collections of Creatives Become Creative Collectives: A Field Study of Problem Solving at Work. Organization Science 17(4): 484