On the creative climate and innovativeness at the country level

The paper presents an explorative study on creative climate and innovativeness at the county level in the EU27. We explored a possibility to extend the Ekvall's concept of creative climate for innovativeness from the level of individual organization to the national level. The main research goal was to identify fragments of national creative climate and to prove its relation to innovativeness. As the measurement for national innovativeness we took the Summary Innovation Index. The fragments of national creative climate were identified by 25 questions and answers selected from different public opinion polls published in the Eurobarometers. Using hierarchical clustering we clustered all EU member states and compared them with the clusters that identify Innovation Leaders, Innovation Followers, Moderate Innovators, and Catching-up countries. We found membership of both sets of clusters similar, which means that two essentially different sets of variables arriving from two completely different sources led to comparable result. We also identify top ten variables that contributed the most to distinguishing between Creative climate clusters. Finally, we argued that understanding creative or innovative climate in the EU countries is an important national policy-making tool that could complement hard macro-economic indicators that are focused on innovative performance only, and not also on innovative socio-cultural environment. We wished-for a unified approach in the EU to develop an objective measurement for creative climate at country level. We also discussed some research challenges linked to this idea.