National culture and innovation capability: some observations concerning Chinese‐Americans

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the literature and discuss the relations between national culture, national subcultures and innovation based on three perspectives: divergence, convergence and crossvergence.Design/methodology/approach – Based principally on previous studies in the “culture” and “culture and innovation” literature, this paper reviews two key sets of literature: first, the three perspectives of macro‐level cultural interaction are reviewed; second, the relationship between culture and innovation is reviewed. Hofstede's five dimensions of culture in the workplace are employed when discussing the impact of culture and innovation.Findings – The outcome of the review suggests that the product of crossvergence (Chinese‐American culture in this case) has a high potential to be more innovative than one of the two interacting cultures (Chinese), but does not draw a conclusion regarding relative innovativeness between Chinese‐American and US culture. It is generally found that Wester...