What we know about the Culture-innovation Relationship Studies: A systematic Review of the Literature

Studies about the relationship between innovation and culture cover a wide range of different academic fields, including different approaches and specific issues. This kind of variety is also typical of cross cultural research applied to management issues. As Capaldo et al. (2012) stated, those studies can be compared to a mosaic, in which each tile color can be seen as representation of a different research topic of interest. In order to discover the “chromatic structure of the mosaic”, the aim of this research is to develop a systematic literature review (SLR) about the culture-innovation relationship. This review highlights how cultural factors have been analyzed in the field of business innovation studies, considering both those that can be more focused on innovation (at the national, firms, group, and individual levels), and those that can be considered more dedicated to the study of cultural contexts for innovation. The SLR process was based on three stages: in the first one, we ran a manual search in general management and specialized journals (Mueller et al. 2013; Short 2009) supplemented by international business journals (total n. of journals 29), using the same keywords (cultur* [AND] innovat*) in title and/or abstract. The output of this stage was a list of articles (n. 253) organized as items of a database, in which each article has been classified by source, journal, year, author(s), title, abstract, keywords and context of research (sample nationality). In the second stage, after the decision about the exclusion criteria, the final list of articles were coded in order to identify relevant topics grouped in “innovation-related” and “culturerelated” studies. The last stage, gave us the chance to reflect on the research gaps and future directions of both types of innovation-culture relationship studies.