Leading Innovation in a Multicultural and Digitally Connected World – An Exploratory Study

The rapidly evolving competitive global marketplace with its culturally diverse customers has increased demand for multinational corporations (MNCs) to accelerate global innovation. Leaders increasingly face the challenge of facilitating global and local team knowledge in order to improve strategic planning and execution for new products and services worldwide. An unresolved question in this regard is how global leaders can facilitate multicultural team collaboration aimed at improving performance of global innovation initiatives? Addressing this research question, a qualitative study was conducted focusing on the role of global leadership in facilitating multicultural collaboration and global innovation performance. The study included interviews with 105 global project leaders at 36 MNCs with headquarters based in Europe, Asia, and North America. These exploratory findings demonstrate how global leadership behaviors can facilitate cross-cultural collaboration for international project performance.