Citation : Dobni, C. B. (2008). Measuring innovation culture in organizations.

European Journal of Innovation Management, 11(4), 539-559.

Article Number : 16
Name : Larasati Adenin Ramadhani (GM3/29316054)
Course Number : MM5014
Date : July 5, 2017

Article Overview
In an organization, innovation is often expressed through behaviors or activities that
are ultimately linked to an outcome. The innovation itself has proven to be linked with the
culture of the organization. Innovation culture has been defined as a multi-dimensional context
which includes the intention to be innovative, the infrastructure to support innovation,
operational behaviors necessary to influence a market and value orientation, and the
environment to implement the innovation. Any attempts to measure innovativeness was made
to understand the significant and positive impact on organizational innovativeness and
performances. Adopting the exploratory factor analysis, principal components of the
innovation culture has been estimated with the goal of analysis to explain correlations among
a set of variables.
As the main objective was to develop a generalized instrument to measure innovation
culture, the sample of the data included management and operational level employees. The data
for this paper came from the survey that sent to a large financial services organization in
Canada which was electronically administered to 509 active employees via the organizations
intranet administration survey. The organization had not yet established any innovation metrics
or any firm timelines for implementation, therefor they were still unaware of the impact of their
innovation initiative to the date of survey. The main findings after testing the hypotheses from
the data given is that innovation culture scale may be best represented through a structure that
consists of seven factors, they are innovation propensity, organizational constituency,
organizational learning, creativity and empowerment, market orientation, value orientation,
and implementation context.
The conclusion is that the role of innovation is becoming increasingly more important
in an organization as management is beginning to realize that innovation creates long-lasting
advantages. Therefore, if the management successfully implemented an innovation culture, it
will provide competitive advantage and result in industry leading performance. Developing a
measure of organizational innovation culture is necessary since it would help the organization
to construct the innovation culture.

Key Learning Points

Key learning points of this paper is to develop an empirically-based comprehensive
instrument for measuring an organizations innovation culture. This is intended to gain more
perspective in measuring the innovation culture in an organization. Innovation itself is very
much contextual from an organizational culture perspective and the extent to which an
organization can be regarded as innovative will be circumscribed by its culture. Culture in an
organization is defined as the deeply seated values and beliefs shared by employees at all levels,
and manifested the characteristics of the organization. It influences creativity and innovation
in a number of ways including socialization process and the value proposition communication
through structures, policies, and day-to-day artifacts and procedures.
The paper has proposed that innovativeness in an organization can be broadly defined
ranging from the intention to be innovative, to the capacity to introduce some new product,
service or idea through the introduction process and systems which can lead to enhanced
business performance. The seven-factor model that used on the paper present a practical way
to measure an organizations innovation culture with the key point of this scale to focus on
dimensions and activities that need to be present for the organization to be considered
innovative.

Follow-On Research
There are several other studies that have been done since the publication of the paper.
Brettel, M., & Cleven, N. J. (2011) on their article found that innovation culture has significant
impact and contribution on the innovativeness of a firm. They measured it with the openness
of the firm to be innovative by being open to external knowledge which measured in terms of
its collaborative behavior. Anna Strychalska-Rudzewicz (2014) on her article identified factors
of organizational culture that influence innovation of enterprises, as well as to determine the
strength of this effect. Her research shows that the number of product innovations implemented
(brand new and upgraded) and process innovations (brand new and upgraded) increases
together with the enterprise size. Eynde, Caamares, Garcia and Muoz (2015) on their article
described the innovation culture in organizations from the perspective of individuals in addition
to taking context into account with consideration that innovation culture is essential to enhance
the innovation capability of organizations.
These follow-up studies on measuring the innovation culture in an organization had
confirmed that the findings on this article addressed how important to measure the innovation
culture of an organization in order to gain competitive advantage which result in industry
leading performance.

Implication

The culture of an organization and innovation are interconnected to each other.

Therefore, innovation would not last long in an organization if there is no innovation culture
in it. A firm has to make several measurements in order to see how the innovation works and
needs to set an innovation culture framework to keep being innovative. The successful
innovation culture in an organization requires an openness of the firm to the innovation, the
infrastructure to support innovation thrusts, how the innovation implemented in the firm, and
the environment or context to support implementation. Measuring innovation culture will help
organizations to define strategies to gain its competitive advantage. For example, by measuring
how the environment or context to support implementation, the firm would be able to define,
instill and reinforce innovation supporting traits among employees.

References

Brettel, M., & Cleven, N. J. (2011). Innovation culture, collaboration with external partners
and NPD performance. Creativity and Innovation Management, 20(4), 253-272.
Strychalska-Rudzewicz, A. (2014). Determinants of organizational culture that influence
innovation. The case of production companies in Poland.
Muoz-van den Eynde, A., Cornejo-Caamares, M., Diaz-Garcia, I., & Muoz, E. (2015).
Measuring Innovation Culture: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional
Questionnaire.