Exploration of the effects of transparency, democracy, wealth, diversity and group cohesiveness on national innovation

The importance of innovative output as a means to a firm-level or nation-level competitive edge, is a core motivator in economic development. This thesis uses a quantitative and hypothesis-driven approach grounded in existing theoretical and empirical work at organisational and group-level studies of innovation and creativity.

Secondary datasets from global research institutions (with a sample of 139 nations) have been utilised to support statistical modelling using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). </p><p dir="ltr">The findings indicate that there is a negative relationship between national innovation and diversity, a novel result in context of current literature on innovation and diversity but confirms that variables associated with innovative performance at a group level – notably; transparency, democracy, wealth, social capital, group cohesiveness and Gini Coefficient apply at national level.