The geography of innovation is changing. Economic powerhouses such as China and India are steadily climbing up global innovation ranking tables. Singapore – ranked the most innovative in Asia – has been a constant among the top 10 economies on the Global Innovation Index.
This story of Asia’s blossoming innovation can be painted in broad strokes: public policies are now prioritising innovation and the region’s economic growth has been resilient in recent years.
What organisations and leaders need, however, is a more nuanced understanding that accounts for the varied national cultures within Asia and illuminates how cultural differences feed into innovation processes.
In other words, insight into how culture shapes the way they ought to manage their innovation teams.
Asia is no monolith, so roughshod East versus West analysis does little to clarify how cultural differences affect innovation. This is why we decided to apply an Asia-centric perspective to investigate cultural differences across China, India, and Singapore. Our aim was to tease out how culture affects team innovation – the way groups surface, discuss, pursue and implement new ideas.
How cultural traits influence team innovation
One established way to think about team innovation is to see it as the product of a blend of “exploration” activities such as search, discovery, variation and experimentation and “exploitation” ones such as refinement, reducing variation, efficiency, production and selection.
With this, we derived hypotheses on how cultural traits unique to Chinese, Indian and Singaporean teams make them more likely to focus on “exploration” or “exploitation” activities.
For Chinese culture, which is strongly influenced by Confucian thought and its emphasis on hierarchy and status, we chose three representative traits of “guanxi” – strong networks of reciprocal relationships, “ting hua” – an attitude of obedience and deference, particularly to a superior’s words, and “yao mianzi” – concern with the preservation of face, or image.
Since voicing a new idea often requires challenging the status quo and taking on individual risks, it is reasonable to expect that the prevalence of “guanxi”, “ting hua” and “yao mianzi” attitudes might inhibit “exploration” activities in Chinese teams, while making “exploitation” efforts more efficient.
In India on the other hand, the education system values “leela” – a playfulness and willingness to defy social norms that is expected and encouraged from childhood. Also celebrated in Indian culture is “jugaad”, the ability to resolve problems with limited resources in a creative and frugal way. These suggest that Indian innovation teams would tend towards more “exploration” in their pursuit of innovation.
As for Singapore, we identified two cultural traits as common and relevant to innovation: the tendency to be “kiasu” or afraid of losing, and “niao”, a bent towards fussiness, stinginess and “going by the book”. Both of these point to lower levels of “exploration” for Singapore’s innovation teams.
By interviewing 15 managers with experience in innovation projects in at least one of these three countries, we teased out further characteristics of the three cultures. The Chinese were often described as disciplined and focused, Singaporeans as structured, fearing failure and sticking to the plan, while Indians were described as creative, flexible and frugal.
These gelled well with what we predicted – high exploitation in China, high exploration in India and low exploration in Singapore. Survey data collected from students in China, India and Singapore further verified these cultural traits to be reflective of each of those countries.
More interesting, however, was our survey of over 600 individuals from 138 innovation teams in companies across the three locations, which included evaluations of team supervisors.
As expected, Indian teams were more likely to engage “exploration” activities – like experimenting and searching – more so than their Chinese and Singaporean counterparts. Chinese teams also tended more towards “exploitation” activities – like production and selection – more than the Indian and Singaporean ones.
Surprisingly though, Singaporean teams were less likely to engage in “exploitation” activities than both Chinese and Indian teams. And only “exploration” correlated well with overall team innovativeness across the three countries, suggesting that the blend of the two sorts of activities works differently in different cultures.