Not Only Individualism: The Effects of Long-Term Orientation and Other Cultural Variables on National Innovation Success

Abstract

This article re-examines the effects of culture on national innovation rates. Pointing to the innovation success of some East Asian countries, it argues that the cultural dimension of individualism is not able to fully account for the role of culture in national innovativeness, and there is a need to include a wider set of cultural factors in the analysis. Several competing measures of national innovation performance over the last decade and Hofstede’s measures of culture, as well as their recently revised versions proposed by Minkov and collaborators, are employed to test the hypotheses. The findings show that, apart from individualism, long-term orientation, and flexibility, the dimensions omitted in the prior studies are positive and strong cultural predictors of national innovation intensity, whereas the role of other cultural factors finds little empirical support. The study suggests that there is no single pattern for the impact of culture on national innovation rates that should be taken into account in seeking effective innovation strategies and policies. It also highlights the need to advance the understanding of the causal mechanism between culture and innovativeness to guide further theoretical and empirical analysis.