By Sandra Lusmägi IBL13 alumna

In the autumn semester of 2015  I  attended the course Strategic Management. The professor Daryl Chapman introduced his article about Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds, that was published in the course textbook Exploring Strategy: Text and Cases 10th Edition. I was impressed and proud to see Metropolia Business School’s name printed in a world class textbook and the author himself was teaching the course on strategy. At that time, I couldn’t foresee that little over a year later my name would appear next to Daryl Chapman in Pearson’s 11th edition of Exploring Strategy.

I had been interested in startups for many years, so I decided to write the final project for the Strategic Management course about Supercell, a successful Finnish gaming company. A short while after completing the course, Daryl contacted me with the offer to assist him on updating the case study about Rovio Entertainment. Although I was busy with my internship and writing my thesis, I immediately said yes to such an exciting opportunity.

As it is common with startups, things change fast – that meant re-writing almost the entire article. I enjoyed the process of researching and writing since I was interested in the topic and knew quite a lot about Rovio and business models of gaming companies. It was easy to communicate with Daryl and he trusted my ability to work quite independently on the project while he was busy teaching at the business school. When I submitted the final draft, I went through the editing process with Daryl and got feedback from the publisher.

Publishing research articles is important in academia, the competition to get articles published in journals and books is fierce. It is not common that a student gets a chance to write an article for a book that sells more than a million copies worldwide! While it is unusual, it’s not impossible and I encourage students to pursue the topics that interest them most, it can lead to wonderful and unexpected things.

The 11th edition of Exploring Strategy was published in January 2017. The book is now available in Metropolia Business School’s library, in the short loan collection. The article is called Rovio Entertainment – going back to the entrepreneurial roots, starting from page 335.

Thank you again, Daryl, for opening the door to a whole new world of possibilities as a writer and researcher! It was an honor to be part of this experience and I hope to continue my writing career in the future.

Sandra Lusmägi