According to new research, based on a survey of 1,800 professionals, as well as on 40 case studies and many interviews and focus groups, a diverse workforce drives both innovation and market growth for companies  Tweet This!. The research focused on two sorts of diversity, inherent – referring to characteristics one is born with, like gender – and acquired – involving characteristics gained with experience, such as language skills.

Key findings include:

• Companies with 2-D diversity (i.e. companies whose leaders showed no less than three inherent and three acquired diversity characteristics) outperformed and out-innovated the competition. Employees from these companies were 45 percent more likely to report that their company’s market share increased during the preceding year and 70 more likely to report that their company captured a new market.

• When at least one member of any team shares common characteristics with the end user, the whole team better understands the user: a team with a member who shares the same ethnicity with a client was found to be 152 percent more likely, compared to other teams, to understand that client.

• Creating a “speak up” culture is key to fostering innovation, as, according to the research, in such a culture employees were “3.5 times as likely to contribute their full innovative potential”.

References:

This article was compiled using a Harvard Business Review article. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses but made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the article’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original please revert to the link below:

https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation

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