A Culture of Innovation

Culture is a key enabler of innovation in an organisation. Culture underpins the values that are important to people and the motivations for their behaviours. When these values and behaviours align with the goals of innovation, it can lead to high performance across teams that are tasked with the challenge of leading, inspiring and delivering innovation. Many scientists and researchers are faced with these challenges in various scenarios, yet may be unaware of the level of influence that comes from the culture they are part of.

In this episode we talk about what it means to design and embed a culture of innovation. We outline some of our findings in literature about the levels of culture that may be invisible or difficult to measure. Assessing culture helps understand the ways it can empower people to experiment and take risks, and the importance this has for innovation. And where a culture is deemed to be limiting innovation, action can be taken to motivate the right culture and steer the organisation towards a better chance of success.

Futher Reading

• Paper: Hogan & Coote (2014) Organizational Culture, Innovation and Performance (via www.researchgate.net)
• Book: Johnson & Scholes (1999) Exploring Corporate Strategy: Text and Cases 
• Article: Understanding Organisational Culture - Checklist by CMI (via www.managers.org.uk)
• Article: The Cultural Web (via www.mindtools.com)
• Paper: Mossop et al. (2013) Analysing the hidden curriculum: use of a cultural web (via www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
• Book: Bruch & Vogel (2011) Fully Charged: How Great Leaders Boost Their Organization’s Energy and Ignite High Performance (via reading.ac.uk)
• Webinar: Bruch (2012) Fully Charged: How Great Leaders Boost Their Organization’s Energy and Ignite High Performance (via hbr.org)
• Article: Pisano (2019) The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures (via hbr.org) 

Some links above may require payment or login. We are not endorsing them or receiving any payment for mentioning them. They are provided as is. Often free versions of papers are available and we would encourage you to investigate.

Recording date: 12 Aug 2022

Thanks for joining us in the DataCafé. You can follow us on twitter @DataCafePodcast and feel free to contact us about anything you've heard here or think would be an interesting topic in the future.