Emancipation and Innovation: Empirical Evidence on the Relation Between Emancipative Values and Innovative Behavior

Abstract

Innovation is one of the most pervasive concepts in our times while emancipation has gained substantial momentum in recent years. Literature shows that individuals who hold emancipative values demonstrate disposition towards novelty and creativity such as being more tolerant of change and uncertainty, being more trusting, being happier, and accumulating larger social capital. This paper explores novel empirical evidence of the association between emancipative values and innovative behavior. Specifically, we examine whether “emancipated” people are more likely to be innovative and creative. The relationship is tested on cross-sectional dataset of more than 420,000 observations from the World Value Survey. The main choice of method is the OLS regression. Based on individual-level data from the World Value Survey, we find that measures of emancipative values are uniformly and positively associated with measures of innovative behavior. Our results are consistent across various measures of emancipative values and innovative behavior. The study is the first to examine the association between emancipative values and innovative behavior, extending our understanding on the influence of basic human values on individual innovativeness. The paper also presents an alternative proxy for innovation.