Doctoral defence: Vladyslav Soloviov “The role of culture for innovative processes"

On 29 January at 15:00 Vladyslav Soloviov will defend his doctoral thesis “The role of culture for innovative processes“ for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in Economics).

Supervisor:
Professor Anneli Kaasa, University of Tartu
 

Opponents:
Professor Eric Davoine, University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
Professor Tiit Elenurm, Estonian Business School (Estonia)

Summary
Innovation has gradually increased in importance in recent decades. Firms use innovations to survive in the rapidly changing economic environment and obtain a competitive edge. Countries encourage innovation from both firms and academia for multiple reasons, such as increasing the quality of life of their citizens, attracting foreign investments, and developing solutions to face many modern-world challenges. These developments lead to an ever-growing importance of research on the factors that explain the differences in the innovative activity output of different countries. Culture provides one possible way to explain some of these differences. This thesis utilises various cultural theories to improve the understanding of the role culture plays in the innovative activity of different countries and regions. Three empirical articles of the thesis offer insights into the relationship between different elements of culture and innovation and the factors through which culture impacts innovation. The studies utilise newer methodology and data as well as alternative approaches to analysing the link between culture and innovation. The results of the studies of this thesis show that culture is linked with innovation through several other phenomena, including the country’s R&D spending and various aspects of governance. The studies provide evidence of the benefit of analysing the link between culture and innovation at a regional level. They confirm a strong link between innovation and individualism from various cultural theories, both old and new. Finally, they posit that newer sets of cultural dimensions provide more precise measurements for empirical studies and that the researchers could create their own cultural dimensions using the existing questionnaire data.

The defence will be held in Narva Rd. 18–1018 and online

Thesis: https://hdl.handle.net/10062/94844

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