This research analyses organizational characteristics that facilitate people-centered innovation in for-profit organizations. According to innovation management literature as well as social psychology, an organizations competitive advantage depends to an important extent on its employees’ intrinsic motivation to innovate. Push factors as well as barriers have equally been identified by these streams of the academic literature. However, we currently observe a paradigm change that has been accelerated through the Covid-19 crisis, where people seem more and more sensitive to the organizational purpose and thus the social mission of their employer. Research on non-profit organizations already analyzed the correlation between an organization’s purpose and an employee’s engagement to a certain task as well as his/her commitment to the organization. By applying a comparative case study design, we compare an actor of the social and solidarity economy (SSE) to an industrial company in order to transpose those results to for-profit organizations and identify the fundamental factors that foster motivation and ultimately creativity under this new paradigm. Our results suggest however that the sole presence of a social mission of the company is not sufficient for intrinsic motivation. The organizational setting and a clear communication strategy of the corporate values is at least as crucial to maintain motivation over time. We therefore not only provide theoretical contributions to motivation theory, but also practical insights about characteristics that managers have to take into account in order to design an organizational environment that takes individual aspirations into account and is thus fruitful for the emergence of disruptive innovation.
