Cultures that support product-innovation processes

Executive SummaryMost managers know that organizational culture influences the firm's economic consequences and recognize its important role in shaping product-innovation processes. Highly innovation-supportive cultures are credited with fostering teamwork and promoting risk-taking and creative actions that seem directly linked to effective new-product development. Fostering highly innovation-supportive cultures in practice, however, is easier said than done. From the voices of participants in new-product development processes in high-technology organizations, we report what we have learned about the distinctive features of highly innovation-supportive cultures in product-innovation settings and propose how organizations might develop such cultures.