The role of an inclusive innovation culture and innovation support strategies in university managerial and service innovations: Survey results for Australia and New Zealand

We build on recent research on measuring innovation in the public sector to construct and test a questionnaire on administrative and managerial innovations in the university sector. The questionnaire uses a hybrid methodology that combines a ‘subject’ approach, with general questions on innovation activities, with an ‘object’ approach that asks a series of focused questions on a single ‘most important’ innovation. The questionnaire was sent between November 2015 and February 2016 to a sample of 1,732 senior managers at 39 universities in Australia and 6 universities in New Zealand. Responses were obtained from 573, for a response rate of 37.8%. The analyses in this paper focus on the support of the senior executive of universities for an inclusive innovation culture that includes all administrative staff and the use of several advanced methods for innovating. We find that there are large differences across universities in the share of respondents that perceive that their university’s senior executive supports a positive and inclusive innovation culture. Econometric analyses show that support for an inclusive innovation culture increases the use of best-practice methods for innovating and decreases the likelihood of an abandoned or under-performing innovation. However, support for an inclusive innovation culture has no effect on the introduction of entirely new innovations.