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Innovation is an ever-increasing focus for modern organizations; yet research studies on organizational culture have tended to neglect this aspect. This paper specifies the key factors characterising a company's innovation culture and examines the top managers' executed impact as organizational leaders from the individual perspective on implementing and fostering it in their respective organizations. Based on a conceptual framework, the empirically identified key factors of the (1) formal embedment, (2) climate, (3) incentives and reward allocation, (4) integration into decision process, (5) cross-hierarchical communication and (6) communication style are presented. Within the empirical study, 37 top managers of 21 leading companies in the industries of “fashion and accessories” and “watch and jewelry” were interviewed. The results indicate that the impact of top managers lag behind their potential to advance innovativeness through innovation culture, and the detected deficit represents scope for improvement. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications of the study and its limitations.

Past research revealed that social networks play a decisive role for the receipt of new knowledge by engineers and middle‐level managers and, thus, essentially contribute to innovation. However, the question of by which network ties top managers – that is, the key organizational decision‐makers – acquire which kind of innovation‐related knowledge resources has not yet been explored systematically. Our paper addresses this research gap by empirically analyzing knowledge ties of top executives in the European fashion and accessories industry. We draw on the concept of relational embeddedness and focus on knowledge providers and knowledge ties of top managers. Based on this theoretical framework, we conducted 22 semi‐structured interviews with top executives from 11 leading European companies within this industry. We present the main results of this explorative study and identify its important implications from both research and managerial perspective.