Funded by the BSR Interreg Programme, the project Baltic Game Industry (BGI) was launched in October 2017. The core objective was to examine means to boost the Baltic Sea region’s (BSR) game industry by increasing the knowledge and appreciation of the industry with the public authorities, thus getting their support through favourable framework conditions, and by providing means for the industry to strengthen their ecosystem from within. Talent growth has been recognised as the most salient issue, typical for IT industries but even more so for the game industry with its hybrid nature of creativity and technology and the ensuing “creative young hobby developers” with no ambition in entrepreneurship. Game incubation is a fairly recent practice, with only a handful that have been in business over a decade. It is drawing on the model of IT incubation which proves to bear a lot of pitfalls. During the BGI project, we have come to understand that we need to look at the whole game incubation ecosystem and explore ways to strengthen this ecosystem which takes a different perspective and weighing than the industry ecosystem. BGI and the extension project BSGI “Baltic Sea Game Incubation” seeks to demonstrate the benefit of cross-border activities to complement the regional incubation programmes and initiatives.

In the following, we document the conceptualisation process determining the orientation of the pilot activities in what we termed “transnational incubation”. We are looking into three areas for which regional incubators are as a rule not well equipped: commissioning (and remunerating) international experts for webinars providing insights on trends, market behaviour and other current topics, organising an intensive mentoring event (bootcamp) and offering in-depth coaching on “exotic” topics or choices for making games.