Innovativeness and Drivers of Manager's Innovativeness

Introduction

Literature about organizations’ innovativeness originating in different research fields as business, management, and especially behavior theories (Rogers, 2003; Afuah, 2014; Chesbrough, 2017). The business and economics literature speak extensively about the innovations and innovativeness and ways for their realization, but innovativeness and behavior are dealt with separately (Stone, 1981; Hamel & Tennant, 2015; Mirvis & Googins, 2018). The management literature revealed a lot about innovation, business and quality, but more or less separately from the problem of innovative behavior (Daft, 2007; Ponukalin, 2014; Foss & Saebi, 2017). Researchers of human behavior’ studies present a third stream, which have little contact with the first two streams of innovativeness’ studies (Christiansen, 2000; Seo et al., 2014; Walley et al., 2017). Technology studies tried to explain the nature and rate of technological change, but mainly separately from other research fields (Carlsson & Stankiewicz, 1991; Shane, 2008; Vonortas, 2018).

Based on the literature (Afuah, 2003; Rogers, 2003; Chesbrough, 2017), experiences from business practice as well as our discussion in the previous chapter, it is evident that innovativeness can be considered as a prerequisite for organization’s survival and success. When innovation in the literature is defined as every novelty found beneficial in the experience of its users (Borras, 2003; Rogers, 2003; Afuah, 2014), the innovativeness refers to humans and organizations’ capacity to engage in innovation (Hult et al., 2004). Our study originates in management studies which explain innovativeness as capacity, competence and readiness of the organizations and their stakeholders to develop virtue or introduce the novelties or inventions in business (Borras, 2003; Afuah, 2014; Brunswicker & Chesbrough, 2018).

Due to the high potential of innovativeness and its influence on working and operations of organizations, a lot of studies were done about key drivers of innovativeness and innovative working in organizations (Drazin & Schoonhoven, 1996; Slappendel, 1996; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1997; Hurley & Hult, 1998; Walley et al., 2017). Organizations can significantly improve their results, if they innovate their working and behavior through technological and particularly non-technological innovations (Rogers, 2003; Alpay et al., 2012; Hill & Hult, 2015; Nickels et al., 2015; Leoncini, 2016; Zezulka et al., 2016).

The main starting point for separating between the above mentioned two types of innovations is the different role of technology (Adams et al., 2006; Hill & Hult, 2015; Chesbrough, 2017). Technological innovations are typically characterized by development or using new technologies – like new technical knowledge and technical inventions (Rogers, 2003; Chesbrough, 2017; Palazzeschi et al., 2018). In our study we considered technological innovativeness as capacity, competence and readiness of the organizations and their stakeholder for development and realization of a dynamic network of agents interacting in a specific economic/industrial area under a particular institutional infrastructure and involved in the generation, diffusion, and utilization of technology” (Carlsson & Stankiewicz, 1991; Rogers, 2003; Foss & Saebi, 2017).