The Research Of The Relationship Among Corporate Culture, Innovation Drivers And Innovation Capability

The global markets has changed a lot in the past several decades. Fierce competition and increasing pressure are key characteristics of this time. Unprecedented pressure gives Chinese companies unprecedented power, companies must innovate. In this context, innovation has become widely recognized as a key to competitive success. The failure of many corporations is due to the lack of innovation.Therefore, the research studing innovation is important. Scholars have been exploring the factors affecting the innovation drivers and innovation capability, from which organizational culture has been believed as an important one. Many studies have shown the relationship between organizational culture, organizational innovation capability, and innovation drivers (e.g., Danes, Lee, Stafford & Heck, 2008; Merrill, 2008; Schlegelmilch et al., 2003; Cravens,2003; Gang Zhang, Jin Chen, Qingrui Xu, 1997; Tongxiu Li, 2008; Tiehua Xie, 2008). However, the amount of quantitative studies is limited. In other countries, there are several examples. For instance, the studies of Deshpande, Farley, and Webster (1993), and Changda Zheng (2007) have shown that in Japan and the United States, clan and hierarchy culture have negative association with innovation capability, while market and adhocracy culture show a positive one. But, in China, it is a gap of research. This paper contributed to examine the influence of organizational culture on innovation drivers and capability.Another question is whether innovation drivers can convert into innovation capability. Cooper (2005) presented five drivers: advances in technology, globalization, competitive pressure, ever-shortening product life cycles, and changing customer buying needs. Before this theory, Dundon (2002) presented similar result. In China, Yan Li and Qiang Mei (2010) also believed that innovation drivers, including technology push and demand pull, can positively influence innovation capability. However, these theories to some extent lack the support of quantitative studies. To address the research gap, this paper utilized quantitative method to examine to what degree innovation drivers can affect innovation capability.Thus, after the relevant literature was collected and reviewed for the literature of innovation, corporate culture, innovations drivers and innovation capability, this paper found the limit of previous researches, then the conceptual framework and relevant hypotheses of this study were made up. In terms of scales, this paper adopted OCAI scale presented by Quinn (1983) to measure organizational culture. Based on Quinn, organizational culture can be sorted into 4 types: clan, hierarchy, adhocracy, and market. The clan culture (loose/internal) values human commitment, morale, participation, and openness. The adhocracy culture (loose/external) emphasizes adaptability, growth, and innovation. The hierarchy culture (tight/internal) focuses on stability, control, and management of the existing bureaucracy. The market culture (tight/external) emphasizes output, production, efficiency, and goal clarity. In the design of questionnaire, the paper uses OCAI form to measure organizational culture. Regarding innovation drivers, this paper adopted Cooper's theory - the perception of technology advances, globalization, competitive pressure, ever-shortening product life cycles, and changing customer buying needs is the driver of innovation. In terms of innovation ability, on the basis of the previous research, we developed 5 questions, which are being first to market, avoiding late entry, avoiding enter stable or declined markets, being at cutting edge of technology, being leader in other areas like marketing and management.Questionnaires were delivered primarily among MBA students in Jilin University. 122 questionnaires were assigned to the respondents during the process, and then, 4 questionnaires were unanswered or invalid and 118 questionnaires were validate, creating an effective response rate of 96.72%. Then the author analyzed the data through SPSS 13.0 and AMOS 7.0 software, descriptive statistic analysis, reliability and validity analysis, multiple regression analysis were used to test the hypotheses. Finally, the main conclusions were got as follows:Firstly, innovation capability has statistically significant positive association with two types of organizational culture - adhocracy and market, and has no statistically significant correlations with the other two - clan and hierarchy.Secondly, innovation drivers have statistically significant positive association with two types of organizational culture - adhocracy and market, and has no statistically significant correlations with the other two - clan and hierarchy.Thirdly, in terms of the relationship of innovation drivers and innovation capability, all of the five innovation drivers have statistically significant positive correlations with innovation capability.lastly, innovation drivers play an intermediary role in the effect of corporate culture on innovation ability. This research has some contributions to the present innovation theory:First of all, this paper introduced organizational culture into the research of innovation, and the first time used quantitative method to examine the relationship among organizational culture, innovation drivers and innovation capability. One of the conclusions is that different types of corporate culture has a different effect on the innovation, thereby making a new attempt to the theoretical study on the innovation of enterprises in China.Secondly, this paper regarded the process of innovation as a system, analyzed the two steps of innovation process, examined how they influence each other, and how be influenced by external factors, thus expanding the existing theory system of enterprise innovation.Thirdly, based on the aspect of innovation drivers this research explains the relationship between organizational culture and innovation capability, which provides a new way of thinking to the future discussion on enterprise innovation theory.In terms of practice fields, the contributions are:Firstly, the study could help Chinese corporations have deeper understanding on the importance of organizational culture for innovation success and then pay attention to the construction of deeper organizational culture.Futhermore, this research had deeply discussed the function and role of innovation drivers in the enterprise innovation process, which could help the companies to clearly grasp the innovation drivers of itself, and thus stimulate more and better innovations.