Deciphering innovation across cultures

Schumpeter in 1942 clearly established the necessity of innovation for all forms of global competition. The more we enter in globalized markets Innovation is becoming a critical tool for business value creation. Innovation, understood as something new that can create value, the integration or generation of new ideas to generate products or services is widely view as a key driver for a country’s economic growth. Further, policies for economic development are often drafted around a country’s innovative capacity and usually then transferred across Nations as a form of templates for key economic development initiatives. However, there are many definitions of innovation across country/culture levels and therefore the concept of innovation can raise definitional issues. This research argues that a country’s culture may have an impact in defining innovation and as a consequence in the final outputs and aims to seek more precise ways of understanding innovation. Furthermore, the intention of this research is to explore and understand how innovation is perceived across different cultural groups and demonstrate that a unique or singular perception may not be as effective in deciphering this important term. This research presents findings across three different countries with very distinctive and entrepreneurial cultures, although all of three countries are in the Asia Pacific area. The research makes a contribution at two levels. First, at the scholarly level, it contributes toward theory development by improving our understanding of the roles of cultural factors in the innovation concept. This leads to a better perception of the different definitions underlying innovation and how these impact on firms implementing innovation strategies across countries. Second, at an applied level, the study provides insights for management and policy makers. In the case of management, this study provides information that allows them to make decisions that could help them develop or assess the effectiveness of existing innovation activities and strategies. This study finds that the perception and interpretation of innovation across the responders is influenced by their regional location. Few triggers for these interpretations are highlighted however it is discussed that further study is required to understand in depth the reasons for these differences