5 February 2013:
A research project from Martín-de Castro et al. (2013) among 251 Spanish technological manufacturing firms analysed the link between an organisation’s innovation capability and its intellectual and/or organisational knowledge assets together with its ability to deploy these assets.
The research validated a number of generally held assumptions, including:
1) Employees will better exploit their skills, knowledge or experience if they feel trust, common values and support, and if they are encouraged to be innovative;
2) an innovation culture provides opportunities for employees to be involved in decision-making because they are encouraged to communicate their opinions and ideas openly; and
3) organisations require both informal open a well as formalised processes among the innovation value-chain: at the beginning of the innovation process, the most relevant component is the employees’ creativity (informal innovation); later in the formal R&D stages, processes are more formalised.
Reference:
Martín-de Castro, Gregorio; Delgado-Verde, Miriam; Navas-López, José E. & Cruz-González, Jorge 2013, “The moderating role of innovation culture in the relationship between knowledge assets and product innovation”, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, February, vol. 80, no. 2, pp. 351-363.
Link to full text article:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162512001941