The Evolution of Innovation: Cultural Backgrounds and the Use of Innovation Models

摘要

Innovation is said to be one of the most important factors in economic competition. Regions and firms are striving for the establishment of innovative structures. However, the question of how to organize permanent or sustainable innovativeness is not easily answered. Suggesting six rules of innovation, the first rule is, that there is no general rule of how to organize sustainable innovativeness. Anyway, we do know much about innovation killers and about how organizations deal with innovations and we do know that innovations do not happen merely by chance. There are regional paths of innovations, innovation paradigms and long waves of innovation models. For Europe, especially for Germany, the adaptation of 'innovation models' has been very important for the evolution of new institutional and organizational forms, but we can identify striking cultural differences. In Asia, the adaption of the same innovation models did lead to different forms of innovation management with considerably different outcomes. The article concludes that transferring implicates transforming in a culturally path-dependent way.