Individual Innovative Behaviour: Measurement and Its Use in Higher Education Contexts

The purpose of this study is to adapt a multi-dimensional measure of Individual Innovative Behaviour developed by (Kleysen and Street, Journal of Intellectual Capital 2:284–296, 2001) used in work contexts and further validate it in the higher education contexts. The participants were 934 undergraduates from five universities. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the factorial structures proposed by the previous studies. The results showed that individual innovative behaviour was a multi-dimensional construct with five factors: opportunity exploration, generativity, formative investigation, championing, and application. One general score for individual innovative behaviour could be generated from calculating the composite score based on the five first-order innovative behaviour factor scores. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.