Culture and innovation in the international context: a literature overview

Abstract

The ecosystem perspective on innovation and business are becoming critical for organizational innovation, but there is a lack of theoretical consistency concerning the terminology of innovation ecosystem. To remedy this research gap, we introduce the innovation ecosystem in the international business (IB) context and enrich the research about innovation ecosystems. To fulfill our research goals, we conducted a systematic literature review of articles published in ABS journals during the period 1991–2018. Based on a systematical review of a total of 100 articles, we identified thematic differences within the literature related to how culture influences innovation in the IB context (e.g. antecedent/driver, output and commercialization of innovation) and proposed the concept of an innovation ecosystem. In addition, our study also finds that cultural factors run through every link of the innovation ecosystem in the IB context, which lays out the future research agenda.

Keywords:

• Culture
• innovation
• innovation ecosystem
• international business

Acknowledgements

We thank Editor-in-Chief Professor Dienel and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and guidance. The research is in part accomplished when Drs. Tian Mu and Bing Wu are a visiting scholar under the supervision of Dr. Ping Deng in the Monte Ahuja College of Business at Cleveland State University. The first author appreciates the support of East China University of Science and Technology (Grant#JKN012022012). The second author acknowledges support from the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant#71872053 and Grant #71872161), the Ministry of Education (MOE) Project of Key Research Initiatives of Humanities and Social Sciences at Chinese Universities (Grant #17JZD020), and the Monte Ahuja Endowment Fund for the Chair of Global Business at Cleveland State University. The third author acknowledges support from the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant #71202051 and Grant #71972072) and Shanghai Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (Grant#2018BGL007).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.