Building a "creative culture" for sustainable innovation

Innovation has shifted from being about one-off phenomena to being a continuous effort requiring creative engagement and alert responsiveness from organizational actors. As more companies face the need to build a system-wide and sustainable capacity for innovation, creating a "culture of innovation" is becoming a priority. The concept of an "innovation culture" remains undertheorized in the literature, however. We offer a conceptual and practical framework for building an innovation culture in an organization. Specifically, we show how a cultural infrastructure that orients actors in the practices of creativity and improvisation combines with individual meaning-making processes to simultaneously generate innovation and an innovation culture across an organization.