Environmental factors impacting the motivation to innovate: a systematic review

The environments where innovation occurs are often as varied as the areas of endeavors that aspiring innovators could pursue. This systematic review followed the guidelines of the Campbell Collaboration and PRISMA to consolidate the findings of 74 studies into the Expectancy-Value-Cost motivation theoretical framework as a means of usefully isolating for decision-makers the environmental factors that impact the motivation to innovate. The results of this review reveal that additional study of interdisciplinary samples is needed to gather deep narrative and case-driven data that considers the experiences of innovators in addition to organizations. Leaders, including decision-makers, teachers, and supervisors, can set a precedent for their learners and workers to use their past experiences and to feel safe to take intelligent risks and make reasonable mistakes in pursuit of innovating. Ensuring that project teams have a mix of experiences and backgrounds can make for more productive collaborations. Proactively addressing costs can increase workplaces’ psychological safety and stability, which enables workers and learners to better focus on the endeavors at hand. The articles’ evaluation illustrates that conversation about innovation promotion is dominated by business, which reduces the opportunity to learn from other innovation-driven disciplines or take truly interdisciplinary approaches.