Soft skills, hard skills, and individual innovativeness

This paper contributes to the literature on skills and innovativeness of employees at the individual level. Based on a properly designed empirical analysis, the findings improve our understanding of the relation between soft skills, hard skills and individual innovativeness. Cross-sectional data of Indonesian firms from different industries are used from an online survey on manager and worker perceptions related to individual innovation performance on the one hand and individual skills on the other hand. The results show that soft skills and hard skills are significantly and positively associated with individual level innovativeness. However, no complementarity (positive interaction effect) is found between soft skills and hard skills.