Innovation Self-Efficacy

Research-based Program Assessment: Measuring Innovation Self-Efficacy

Innovation is critical to our economic and social prosperity. We rely on industry, university, and government employees to develop, modify, and implement innovative ideas while navigating ambiguous problem contexts, overcoming setbacks, and persisting in competition with courses of action. Research has shown that self-efficacy, or individuals’ belief in their ability, influences the pursuit of and persistence in challenging work, suggesting the criticality of self-efficacy for innovation. Despite resource-intensive efforts to foster innovation in organizations, we inadequately understand how to measure the impact of these interventions on individuals’ judgment of their own innovation ability. As part of our work to design innovation-related interventions and evaluate impact, we share early stage work to develop and validate a survey measure for Innovation Self-efficacy (ISE), or the belief in one’s ability to innovate.

Innovation Self-Efficacy Instrument (29 items) 

Rate your degree of confidence that you can do each of the activities listed below on a scale from 0-100.   Zero indicates that you are not at all confident that you can do the activity and 100 indicates that you are extremely confident that you can do the activity.

  1. Understand the needs of people by listening to their stories
  2. Find connections between different fields of knowledge
  3. Seek out information from other disciplines to inform my own
  4. Identify opportunities for new products and/or processes
  5. Question practices that others think are satisfactory
  6. Come up with imaginative solutions
  7. Make risky choices to explore a new idea
  8. Consider the viewpoints of others/stakeholders
  9. Evaluate the success of a new idea
  10. Apply lessons from similar situations to a current problem of interest
  11. Envision how things can be better
  12. Do things in an original way
  13. Set clear goals for a project
  14. Troubleshoot problems
  15. Keep informed about new ideas (products, services, processes, etc.) in my field
  16. Communicate ideas clearly to others
  17. Provide compelling stories to share ideas
  18. Learn by observing how things in the world work
  19. Solve most problems if I invest the necessary effort
  20. Be resourceful when handling an unforeseen situation
  21. Suggest new ways to achieve goals or objectives
  22. Test new ideas and approaches to a problem
  23. Share what I have learned in an engaging and realistic way
  24. Make a decision based on available evidence and opinions
  25. Relate seemingly unrelated ideas to each other
  26. Think of new and creative ideas
  27. Model a new idea or solution
  28. Find new uses for existing methods or tools
  29. Explore and visualize how things work

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