Diversity: your best innovation partner

By integrating both internal and external views into idea generation, development processes and open innovation strategies, businesses and organizations showcase the value of diversity to optimize inspiration, problem-solving, change management and customer relationships. Those approaches enable to apprehend diversity beyond the usual gender, ethnic and religious scopes that are developed by analysts, press and media. Instead, innovation experts encourage us to embrace human differences as a whole as a way to understand the value of connecting varying skill sets and mindsets to better define adaptive solutions in a growingly complex innovation ecosystem.

Becoming diversity champions

Companies and organizations tend to focus on diversity as an indicator of gender and ethnic integration, rolling-out a marketing and communication speech to prove they comply with a justified customer requirement to encourage diversity. Although critical to participate in shaping a diverse  workforce, this transformation should be followed-up by enabling diversity to generate the creativity innovation depends on to answer human centric needs.

Because they possess the skills, people and projects that have already placed diversity as a core engine for growth, companies and businesses are in a privileged position to showcase the end-to-end success story of diversity and deliver human-centric innovation. To achieve this goal, individuals and teams need to:

•  Acknowledge the human roots of diversity and identify the differences that build their common values
• Realize the beauty of misunderstandings to better create from differences
• List the items composing the costs of uniformity and realize how dramatic the end-result looks like
• Start reverse engineering management and development thinking frameworks towards diversity
• Apply new thinking models in the business world to showcase tangible results that could be transferred outside business area
• Develop diversity in social, economic and political spheres to create a virtuous cycle
• Identify and defend long term benefits of building a common value for diversity

A step-by-step guide to Beautiful Diversity

In order to help innovation leaders and practitioners achieve these objectives, weareinnovation.org has published “Diversity as a success story“, a first report as part of its “Beautiful Diversity” initiative, aiming at enabling individuals to become diversity champions. Based on analyses and articles shared and developed in our global think l@b, this report highlights key thoughts and messages initially shared by business experts, innovation experts and leaders who see diversity as a key component of a sustainable and smart innovation. “Diversity as a success story” enables innovation practitioners, leaders and learners to understand the critical value of inner and outer diversity as a way to learn, share, develop and celebrate differences, jointly shaping a virtuous circle where our common visions of tomorrow improve continuously. 

You can now download “Diversity as a success story” from Gumroad: