The impact of national culture on the choice of innovation strategy

The importance of national culture for the ability to innovate has so far been acknowledged by a relatively few, but growing, number of studies. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of the national culture on the choice of innovation strategies, using data from 188 manufacturing firms on 11 different countries. Using the Hofstede cultural dimensions and the corresponding country comparison ranking, we clustered companies within three groups, according to their national culture proximity. Next, we performed intra- and inter-cluster regression analyses to verify whether specific national culture dimensions influence innovation strategy choice from one cluster to another. Although some differences were found between clusters, the general results are roughly the same. An important observation from our results is that cultural dimension seems to influence the adoption of both exploration and exploitation strategies in the same way, showing that they do not require contradicting cultural orientations to be adopted at the same time.