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The purpose of this paper is to address the key developments concerning innovation at universities at a macro level. It describes the key trends and changes in the governance of universities and the transformation of universities into organizational actors. This also affects the governance on academic research in the sense that it leads to a gradual evolution of the specific public science system in which research is being initiated and executed.

Cultural evolution involves social articulation and transmission of knowledge. What makes a culture distinctive is how it distributes interactions in the information-space.

The innovation policies of the European Union play a noticeable, but not yet dominant, role in the EU member states, at least not in the large member states. The wide gap between the North of Europe and the South and East of Europe in innovative performance is – despite the innovation policies of the European Union – still difficult to overcome.

The actual innovative performance of ten European countries has been evaluated. Northern European countries show a higher score on the Innovation Index, whereas countries in Southern Europe score relatively low. Can we relate this difference to cultural factors?

The purpose of this paper is to address the importance of cultural values, the organizational culture and management style for innovation. It also comparatively evaluates the actual performance of European countries in innovation.

In this paper, the theoretical frameworks of the well-known scholars Hofstede, House, Schwartz, Boisot and Cameron and Quinn are critically evaluated and compared with each other. In addition, the authors compared the cultural rankings and the actual performance in innovation of selected European countries. Before addressing the impact of culture on the innovative strength of nations, different definitions of innovation are being described. The theoretical framework developed on the basis of the six Hofstede dimensions is composed; the nine House dimensions are supplemented and the Schwartz values for innovative strength of nations are also being discussed. Culture as a knowledge asset, the positioning in information space and its influence on innovation following the theories of Boisot and the different cultural types as defined by Cameron and Quinn have been studied and evaluated. The performance of European countries in innovation has been evaluated on the basis of the Global Innovation Index, the patent applications to the European Patent Office and the European Innovation Scoreboard.

Based on literature review, one can conclude that there is a strong positive relation between several cultural characteristics of countries in question and their innovative strength. The results of this paper point out the importance of cultural values for innovation.

This research has assessed the relation between national culture in general on the innovative strength of nations. Future research on which cultural characteristics and management styles have the strongest correlation with the innovative strength of nations could provide valuable insights for both scholars in this research field and for institutions and companies that wish to improve their innovative strength.

The results of this study provide us with the insight that the innovative strength of a nation or organization can be altered by changing (parts of) its culture. A practical implication of this finding is that a government can, for example, increase its nation’s innovative strength by encouraging cooperation between different institutions and by limiting rules and regulations which could cause barriers in the innovation process.

A social implication of the findings of this study is the knowledge that to improve the innovative strength of a nation, a government needs to pursue a pro-active policy of transforming national culture, for example, by changing the educational system and decreasing the power distance between teachers and students. Such an effort to influence the national culture addresses interesting issues regarding the concept of social engineering.

By critically evaluating the qualitative cultural frameworks of several well-known scholars and relating them to quantitative statistical data about the innovative strength of nations, this study has combined the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies and produced non-trivial findings in an original manner.