Assessing organizational innovativeness – evidence from corporate narratives

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to quantify the communication of organizational innovativeness (OI) on a large scale; and to examine the relationship of communicating OI and the corresponding investments in research and development (R & D) of multinational corporations (MNCs).

In total, 3,043 annual reports from 326 MNCs are examined utilizing quantitative content analysis, which focusses on fixed selected terminologies, in the years 1998-2008.

Scholars assume that the capacity for OI is becoming the single most important task in organizational survival. Even though in the sample the investments in R & D are not increasing, even slightly declining, the communication of OI is increasing. Using mixed-effects regression analysis, the findings indicate that the corporations that are investing in R & D are also communicating these efforts correspondingly.

This is the first study that measures the communication of OI using quantitative content analysis.

The results indicate that not only do the communication efforts of an organization’s OI have a perceived increasing importance. They also suggest that OI itself has become more important for organizations from a strategic point of view.