Comparisons, contrasts, and a case study: innovation implications of New Zealand's scores in values and personality

Abstract

In the last two decades, there has been a marked increase in the amount of multinational data freely available to researchers. This has allowed cross-national comparisons on a wide variety of topics (see, e.g., Rosling, 2009). Recently, some of these data sets have been used to investigate the various relationships between the national means of psychological traits and corresponding levels of innovation. While the results of these investigations are theoretically interesting, they have clear implications for national policies, as well. It is the purpose of this paper to show how these results translate into suggestions for those in a position to set and change policies. We do this using New Zealand as a case study, and comparing its national traits to those of other nations who score well on innovation measures. The theoretical links between innovation and the personality traits, values, and creativity measures to be discussed have been set out elsewhere (see Rinne et al., in press; Rinne et al., in preparation; Steel et al., in press). The paper will begin, therefore, with a brief review of the most recent research into the links between these national measures of these characteristics and innovation scores. Next, a comparison of various countries’ scores to those of New Zealand will be conducted. This will lead to a set of recommendations for policy based on those comparisons.