About the Working Paper
The Paper Innoversity - A Study of the dynamics inherent in the relationship between innovation and diversity, was written by Susanne Justesen, Innoversity.dk and published by Copenhagen Business School in May 2001.

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This is where you can download PART I of the Innoversity Paper
This is where you can download PART II of the Innoversity Paper

Abstract
Innovation and the ability to create new knowledge constitutes an important competitive edge for organisations in the 21 st century, and diversity within organisations offers interesting new perspectives for innovation and may increase the ability to create new knowledge. 

Understanding the dynamics of the relationship between innovation and diversity, and thereby how innovative practice may benefit from diversity, thus becomes important to organisations wanting to increase their competitive edge; especially in a decade where changing demographics are affecting, or about to affect, most all organisations.

However, existing theory indicates that diversity is more likely to impair innovative practice, and provides very little support to findings from practice indicating that innovative practice may instead benefit from the potential of diversity. 

But by making use of a Community of Practice Framework, this thesis provides a theoretical explanation to the findings from practice, - thereby addressing the theoretical void arising from such inconsistency between theory and practice.

The theoretical explanation provided in this paper to address this theoretical void centres on two new theoretical findings. Firstly, how diversity may potentially ignite five innoversity drivers seen to enhance different aspects of innovative practice, such as: absorptive capacity, requisite variety, network access, creative destruction and problem solving. 

However, these drivers are difficult to ignite due to diversity also giving rise to intergroup anxiety, miscommunication and goal incongruence – thereby impairing coherence, which is important for innovation to occur.

The second part of the theoretical explanation therefore focuses on understanding the context within which it is possible for the innoversity drivers to ignite. This understanding is obtained by viewing diversity and innovation as embedded in communities of practice, as opposed to traditional teams and workgroups. This Community of Practice Framework establishes how the necessary coherence is obtained – not necessarily from perceived similarity – but instead from the mutual engagement in a shared practice field.

This paper therefore substantiates the potentials of diversity for innovative practice, and demonstrated that the existing theory predicting vicious outcomes from innovation in a diverse setting does actually have a virtuous counterpart: innoversity – both in practice and in theory.