National culture and the secrecy of innovations

The main objective of this paper is to provide greater understanding of the nature of secrecy in firms. It presents an effort to develop some links between management of the secrecy and its relationship with culture. Using measures from Hofstede's (2001) work, we have linked some dimensions of national culture with CIS 3 EU survey database. The results show that some attributes of the culture in organisations as masculinity and uncertainty avoidance have impact on the tendency of the firms for not to patent and maintain secrecy of their innovations.