A Comparative Study of National Culture and Innovation: Effects of Cultural Dimensions on Traditional Innovation and Online Innovation

摘要

This study extends previous research on the relationship between Hofstede's cultural values and innovation by focusing on role of national culture in explaining online innovation. We adopted Hofstede's national culture dimensions to compare different national online innovation rates. The results show that individualism has a significant positive association with both traditional innovation and online innovation. As expected, power distance has a strong negative influence on both traditional innovation and online innovation. Uncertainty avoidance has no significant association with traditional innovation while it has a significant association with online innovation. Masculinity did not have significant association with both traditional innovation and online innovation. Lastly, long-term orientation has positive significant association with both traditional innovation and online innovation. The study supports the findings of the earlier studies that investigated the two cultural dimensions (i.e., individualism and power distance) as factors that influence national innovativeness. However, an interesting finding is that uncertainty avoidance has a significant positive relationship with online innovation. Discussions including interpretations and contributions of findings are presented along with future plan to complete this study.