Cultural Impacts on National Innovativeness: Not Every Cultural Dimension Is Equal

Abstract

National innovativeness is one key driver of economic development. The relation of national innovativeness and national culture has been firmly established by research. Cultural factors, however, influence national innovativeness via different mechanisms on the macro-, meso-, and micro-level of a country. In our article, we build on existing research on the link between cultural dimensions and national innovativeness to develop a new model that classifies different cultural dimensions in groups according to their mechanism: political, social, or individual (PSI-model). Using a newly established data set composed of world data, we test and find support for this model using a variety of regression models. The PSI-model provides a more structured theoretical background of the impact of different cultural dimensions on national innovativeness, especially with regard to social practices and social values. It can be used to generate policy recommendations on national innovativeness and offers further applications in fields related to the various impacts of national culture.

Cultural tightness–looseness and national innovativeness: impacts of tolerance and diversity of opinion

“…Based on categories from the GLOBE study, Schomaker and Deckert (2020) specify cultural dimensions that influence political institutions and therewith national innovativeness. These dimensions are Power Distance, In-Group Collectivism and Performance Orientation (Deckert & Schomaker, 2018). From these, Power Distance 3 and In-Group Collectivism 4 show a close connection to cultural tightness, as typically high degrees of both of these indicators are related to severe restrictions in personal freedom.…”

“…Innovativeness can be defined based on approaches that focus on the adoption of new ideas in a social system, as emphasized by diffusion theory (e.g., Rogers, 2003), or 'the quality of being innovative' (Kumar, 2014: 3; for details on different definitions of innovativeness see Deckert & Schomaker, 2018). The latter one constitutes the approach that is taken in this study.…”

“…Not only the outcome in terms of realized or diffused innovations matter, but also "the fundamental conditions, investments and policy choices that create the environment for innovation in a particular location" (Porter & Stern, 2001: 23). National innovativeness depends on knowledge and technology creation and diffusion, thus the support provided by national institutions as research policies, or "networks of related actors and institutions such as entrepreneurs, private enterprises with professional research and development facilities, public research institutes and universities" (Deckert & Schomaker, 2018). These systems are typically referred to as National Innovation Systems (NIS) or National Systems of Innovation (NSI), and focused on in this paper (Freeman, 1995;Freeman & Soete, 1997;Lundvall, 1999, OECD, 1997.…”

“…The impact of In-Group Collectivism may be explained through the degree of exclusiveness and clanism in a society that may lead to a solidification of the status quo, as these factors help existing elites to maintain and consolidate their position (Deckert & Schomaker, 2018). Thus, the high correlation between In-Group Collectivism and a high degree of cultural tightness makes it plausible to assume the same effects for the latter one (Triandis, 1989).…”

“…While the concept of tightness and looseness often is discussed separately from other concepts of cultural dimensions typically used in empirical work (see e.g., Deckert & Schomaker, 2018), interrelations between different approaches can be identified. Overall, the tightness score of Gelfand et al (2011b) has a statistically significant, negative correlation to individualism and a statistically significant, positive correlation to Power Distance as used by Hofstede (2003), with the Hofstede-dimension of Individualism being positively related to innovativeness, the dimension of Power Distance being negatively related to innovativeness (Deckert & Nyssen Guillén, 2017).…”