Measuring employee innovation

Abstract

Purpose-The paper develops a model of employee innovative behavior conceptualizing it as distinct from innovation outputs and as a multi-faceted behavior rather than a simple count of 'innovative acts' by employees. It understands individual employee innovative behaviors as a micro-foundation of firm intrapreneurship that is embedded in and influenced by contextual factors such as managerial, organizational and cultural support for innovation. Building from a review of existing employee innovative behavior scales and theoretical considerations we develop and validate the Innovative Behavior Inventory (IBI) and the Innovation Support Inventory (ISI). Design/methodology/approach-Two pilot studies, a third validation study in the Czech Republic and a fourth cross-cultural validation study using population representative samples from Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic (N=2812 employees and 450 entrepreneurs) were conducted. Findings-Both inventories were reliable and showed factorial, criterion, convergent and discriminant validity as well as cross-cultural equivalence. Employee innovative behavior was supported as comprising of idea generation, idea search, idea communication, implementation starting activities, involving others and overcoming obstacles. Managerial support was the most proximal contextual influence on innovative behavior and mediated the effect of organizational support and national culture. Originality/value-The paper advances our understanding of employee innovative behavior as a multi-faceted phenomenon and the contextual factors influencing it. Where past research typically focuses on convenience samples within a particular country, we offer first robust evidence that our model of employee innovative behavior generalizes across cultures and types of samples. Our model and the IBI and ISI inventories enable researchers to build a deeper understanding of the important micro-foundation underpinning intrapreneurial behavior in organizations and allow practitioners to identify their organizations' strengths and weaknesses related to intrapreneurship.

Innovative Behavior in Nursing Context: A Concept Analysis

“…Idea generation: Idea generation is considered as "a behavioral aspect of creativity in all studies of employee innovative behavior" [31]. It is frequently stimulated by obvious difficulty or challenging condition.…”

“…Idea search: Innovative activity may also be promoted by individuals searching for new ideas based on searches of existing knowledge sources in their environment [31,39]. On the other hand, existing knowledge can be called as knowledge acquisition.…”

“…A champion is someone who emerges to put efforts into creative ideas [2]. The innovation champion starts implementing activities with confidence by preparing plans for implementation in an unstructured environment [31]. This requires anticipating problems and developing contingency plans, as well as obtaining funds and resources [31].…”

“…Overcoming obstacles: Overcoming obstacles is a key challenge in the implementation phase to achieve the innovation output [43]. The outputs refer to "reports of achieved changes such as implemented new ideas that changed products, services, or processes in an institution" [31]. Overcoming obstacles should be achieved by adapting the idea or implementation strategies until a product, service, or process has been enhanced.…”

“…For instance, articles suggested that the definition for innovative behavior often only referred to the definition by West and Farr which has been introduced in 1990 for defining innovation [6,45,46]. Moreover, authors have implied a deferent number of dimensions such as one dimension [31,48], two dimensions [47], three dimensions [13,38], four dimensions [49,50], five dimensions [51], and six dimensions [31]. To date, it is evident that there are many definitions of innovative behavior in different disciplines shown in the Table 1.…”