Strategic Innovation: Embedding Innovation as a Core Competency in Your Organization

CHAPTER FIVE

Culture and Values

Understanding the culture and values of your organization is critical to the embedment process. Culture and values reside in the every fold of an enterprise, influencing the dynamics of how people perform, relate, and perceive the organization's impact on their lives. The noted organizational psychologist Edward Schein defined organizational culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems” (1992, p. 12).

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