Measuring innovation culture in organizations

Abstract

PurposeAcademic and practitioner interest has focused on innovation as a method of competitive differentiation and as a way to create customer value. However, less attention has been devoted to developing a measure of innovation culture. The purpose of this paper is to develop an empirically‐based comprehensive instrument for measuring an organization's innovation culture.Design/methodologyThis paper describes a procedure which explicates the innovation culture construct, and proposes a multi‐item measure of innovation culture predicated on exploratory factor analysis. These descriptors were derived from extant literature, key informant interviews, and a survey of over 282 employees from the financial services industry.FindingsFindings suggest that an innovation culture scale may best be represented through a structure that consists of seven factors identified as innovation propensity, organizational constituency, organizational learning, creativity and empowerment, market orientation, value orientation, and implementation context.Practical implicationsThe seven‐factor model can be used both descriptively and diagnostically. Among other things, it presents a practical way to measure an organization's innovation culture, and could initially be used to establish a baseline level of innovation culture. From there, it could be used as a metric to chart the organization's efforts as it moves to engender innovation.Originality/valueMore effort should be devoted to developing measures to assess innovation culture specifically. This model presents an innovation culture construct that is complimentary to work that has preceded it. The findings combined with the suggestions provide an alternative perspective as a measure of innovation and extends a basic framework for further investigation.