In an increasingly competitive landscape both domestically and internationally, organizational leaders from all sectors have identified innovation as one of the most important organizational competencies necessary to drive and sustain performance over time. An organization’s dedication to ensuring a culture of innovation, in particular, has become increasingly more relevant within the last two decades. A 2008 McKinsey survey of nearly 1,400 executives from around the world (Barsh et. al., 2008) reported that 94 percent of respondents unanimously concluded that people and corporate culture were the most important drivers of innovation. The same study showed that applied resources and processes were either underutilized or not achieving scale to have a financial impact. Booz Allen also surveyed the innovation practices of Global 1,000 firms and reported on them since 2005. In their 2011 report (Jaruzelski et al., 2011), Booz Allen concluded:

The elements that make up a truly innovative company are many: a focused innovation strategy, a winning overall business strategy, deep customer insight, great talent, and the right set of capabilities to achieve successful execution. More important than any of the individual elements, however, is the role played by corporate culture–the organization’s self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing–in tying them all together.(p. 2)