Innovation Culture in French Organisations

Abstract

The aim of this study was to measure the relative impact of culture and processes on innovation performance. Contrary to processes, culture represents all implicit factors influencing daily behaviour. Culture gathers the unwritten rules of the social game and serves as social cement for an organisation. Processes correspond to identified and formalised practices and rules, including having a dedicated team or qualified collaborators for running product design and development, for example. Based on the scientific literature, we designed a survey to assess these three sides of innovation (culture, processes and performance). We analysed the answers of 432 French innovation managers in order to identify the predictors of Innovation performance. The whole model appears highly explanatory and shows that innovation culture holds a predictive power nearly four times as high as innovation processes. In particular, eagerness for radical change, which is not so common in French organizations, is the strongest predictor of innovation performance. Collective discovery skills and innovation climate were also good predictors of innovation performance, whereas risk aversion and tradition appear as marginal negative predictors. . These results are original because practitioners and researchers mainly produce guidelines focused on innovation processes, methods and tools as if they were the only drivers of innovation. However, the major challenge for stimulating innovation could be to understand the organization’s culture and design processes that will be both congruent to the existing culture and likely to initiate a first step to cultural change, which remains long and uncertain.