The project focuses on Spanish companies in order to build a Spanish Index which aims to measure and quantify the effect of the Diversity-Innovation relationship. On this topic, previous academic research suggests that:

• Companies that manage diversity are more competitive
• Companies that manage innovation are more competitive
• Diversity and Innovation management generates a more competitive organization

During 2017 Fundación Diversidad and the IE Center for Diversity already collaborated on a prior study on this matter: The Diversity Lab Project.  The main results were:

• There’s a positive relationship between Diversity and Innovation.
• There’s a different meaning for ‘Diversity’ and ‘Innovation’ depending on Innovation or Diversity Unit.
• There’s a great opportunity for collaboration between Innovation and Diversity Units.

What we already know is that in our extremely competitive market, organizations look for differentiation in order to maintain the lead. Diversity & innovation management have proved to be to differentiated elements for organizational competitiveness. Results of the Diversity Lab research indicate that an effective relation between diversity and innovation can boost competitive advantage. That’s why we launched a second part of the project which aims to answer the following questions and also to measure with numbers the positive relationship between D&I:

The InnoDiveristy Index is really a worldwide leading research on Diversity and Innovation. The main platform to recollect the data among companies is called “The InnoDiversity Tree”. It’s a very interesting application. Companies can complete very easily the tree and know in a few minutes how their company is positioned in Diversity, Innovation and InnoDiversity. They will also receive some recommendations which will guide them on his agenda. It is not only a survey; it’s a diagnosis tool for companies. In other words, a great opportunity for companies to know where they stand in terms of D&I. The aggregate data will be used once a year to build the Innodiversity Index in order to have indicators which measure the progress of Spanish enterprises on this matter during the time. Companies can participate for free and the Index will be published anonymously.

For the future, the challenges are on one hand to export this leading research to others countries, and on the other hand, to achieve that more and more Spanish companies of any kind include D&I in their business mandate.

The InnoDiversity Index will be presented by the end of 2019 in Madrid, Spain.

https://www.innodiversidad.es/#/main (only available in Spanish)