The Cultural Side of Innovation: Adding Values

In most discussions about the knowledge-based economy, innovation is associated or even equated with technology, while culture’s influence is ignored. Innovation is however embedded in cultural and social contexts, and neglecting these crucial contexts may impede an innovation’s diffusion―and eventual success.

This book places culture at the center of discussions on innovation, beginning with a comprehensive introduction to innovation’s various forms, including the history, sociology, and economics of innovation. Insights from marketing and psychology are integrated into a complexity theory framework, which are then utilized to evaluate case studies of organizations experiencing repeated innovation successes. The sometimes fraught relationship of firms to creativity is discussed, and a new model for to calculating the creativity of an economy is presented.

Dany Jacobs is Professor of Industrial Dynamics and Innovation Policy at the University of Amsterdam, as well as Professor of Art, Culture, and Economy at the Universities of Applied Science HAN and ArtEZ in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He is author of Mapping Strategic Diversity (2010).