Development and validation of Spanish version of FINCODA: an instrument for self-assessment of innovation competence of workers or candidates for Jobs

Abstract

This work will take the innovation transversal competence a skill to create, introduce, adapt and/or apply a beneficial novelty anywhere in an organization. We consider that innovation competences are a multidimensional construct that represents the skills required in all main process steps, from devising ideas, filtering, modeling and selecting them, to putting them into practice and comparing to see if they add value.

In this research we aim to validate the long Spanish version (62 items) of the FINCODA innovation questionnaire (Andreu Andres et al., 2018; Marin-Garcia et al., 2016a) and to check if the medium-length version composition (34 items), that derive from a multi-cultural sample (Butter & van Beest, 2017), is stable with an independent sample of Spanish students. We will also propose a short version from the Soft Skills Scale (SSS17) (Marin-Garcia, 2019), based on single-items of all dimensions, which we will compare with other transversal competences by analyzing the relations among them. Data were obtained from self-perceptions (the evaluated person completes the questionnaire) with Likert/rating scales (Marin-Garcia et al., 2015) of innovation competence dimensions. This questionnaire is devised to be used for processes that select/evaluate the people who opt for a job post, regardless of them recently obtaining university degrees or being professionals.

We examined the main published questionnaires used to measure the innovation competence. The validation of only a few has been published, while no validation has been published in Spanish. We also describe in detail the validation process that we will follow, the employed measuring instrument (by giving a detailed explanation of how the FINCODA questionnaire was built, and by specifying the measuring model and SSS17, F62 and F34 questionnaire items in their English and Spanish versions), the characteristics of the sample of 329 voluntary students, and the analysis procedure following SPSS and smartPLS.

The results show how the measurement model of the long FINCODA questionnaire version presents content validity (relevance and comprehensiveness) and internal consistency (with analysis considering constructs to be either common factors or composites). Nonetheless, the discriminant validity of the constructs could not be demonstrated with the employed sample. Our analyses did not confirm the medium-length version put forward by other authors’ previous research. So, we will consider that versions F62 and F34 are pending to be analyzed with new independent samples, as is the proposal of the new F34 version obtained by more robust methods. The multidimensionality assumption of the innovation construct also needs revising. Having a short innovation scale with 10-15 items at the most is also recommendable. All this is considered future research in the present work.