Culture Drives Innovation

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Culture drives innovation. From Apple’s startup culture to 3M’s culture of out-of-the-box thinking to Samsung Electronics’ culture of strong support for risk-taking, there are many examples of how unique organizational cultures have driven successful innovations. Despite these and many other cases, managers and leaders often focus on organizational structure, job characteristics, management processes and capital as the main drivers of innovation. However, recent studies suggest that organizational culture is the strongest driver of all and is perhaps a root source influencing many of the factors that have a more visible effect on innovation outcomes. Organizational culture refers to the underlying values, beliefs and principles that serve as a foundation for an organization’s management system as well as the management practices and behaviors that exemplify and reinforce those principles. While organizational culture encompasses various elements, high-performing organizations have certain elements in common. The Denison Organizational Culture Model includes four essential traits — mission, consistency, involvement and adaptability — of high-performance organizational culture. Studies by Denison Consulting — an organizational culture and leadership development consulting firm — have shown that these traits are important for organizational performance. Company consultants hypothesized that each trait would be important for innovation. Three studies were conducted — the results from which were published in 2012 — using the Denison Organizational Culture Survey developed based on the model in Figure 1. High scores indicate a high level of clarity and alignment related to elements of organizational culture, whereas low scores indicate that cultural capabilities are not well developed in the organization. Exploring the Culture-Innovation Link The three
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