Innovationskompetenz für nachhaltiges Wirtschaften und Instrumente ihrer Erfassung

The sustainable development of a society demands companies to initiate innovation processes and to acquire the necessary innovation competence. The current paper presents a model for describing such a competence as part of the professional action competence of employees. Based on this model the paper reports the development of instruments for measuring the knowledge and the beliefs about the source, structure, applicability, certainty, and justification of knowledge in sustainable business administration (epistemic beliefs). For assessing the knowledge in sustainable business administration a multiple-choice test is developed comprising 15 tasks. A study with 101 students reveals that the new test is in line with the properties and assumptions of a Rasch model. For measuring the beliefs about knowledge in sustainable business administration a questionnaire is developed. Based on a survey of 292 students the questionnaire reveals high reliabilities (about .800) and discriminant validity. A third study with 1,149 commercial apprentices confirms the properties and factor structure of the new questionnaire. The results reveal that learners differ in their knowledge about sustainable business administration depending on their specific profession. While the year of training does not influence apprentices’ knowledge their beliefs about the structure and certainty of knowledge in sustainable business administration explain about 12 % of the variation in sustainable business administration knowledge.