Innoversity: Innovation and diversity in enterprise

Academics

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June 2008 | By Yanire Braña, Director of the MET Program at IE Business School

Forget established patterns of behaviors. Innovation plays a key role in growing a business and making it profitable. But companies also have to remember to include diversity in the equation.

In an age where attracting talent and brand power are fundamental, many companies have been forced to cultivate their uniqueness, looking for new ways of developing the values and factors that enable them to do just that. Accordingly, they turn to innovation as the only way to maintain or create a new competitive edge that can be sustained over time.

The most innovative enterprises are aware that innovating is not simply creating or modifying products and services, but rather it is sometimes important to create an infrastructure of people and processes that allows them to respond to all their current and future needs.

The need to grow their business and making it profitable makes companies occasionally focus exclusively on their competitors, customers and employees, but what happens with other factors? Business reality tells us that customer retention and loyalty strategies are often designed but that they do not always include employees and often overlook an important potential market: non-customers and non-employees. Then there are the difficulties involved in learning about this particular segment, which is the result of massive demographic, economic and sociocultural change and often fails to present the kind of segmentation criteria that makes for in-depth knowledge. New technologies make it easy for enterprises to see beyond their traditional sources of advantage, but sometimes this is not enough to actually innovate or the renew competitive advantage. In order to maximize all the options, companies also need to invest in discovering the differences among their customers and employees that can take them beyond existing demand and open up the door to a new mass of customers and employees that did not exist until now.

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What happens at IE in summer?

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All candidates who know a little bit the structure of our programs at IE Business School, noticed that IE is closed in August. First of all, our faculty needs a break – from the students, just kidding – but also we are using this break in order to renovate, recreate and update our installations. Currently,…

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The Reign of Spain: European champions (of nearly everything)

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This article was published last month in the Independent, and certainly is catches your attention as it describes many undiscovered attributes of Spanish life: Food, Fashion, Architecture, Society, Cultural Heritage, Travel Destination!

Sunday night’s triumph in Vienna was a moment of pride, unity and joy for this nation â?? and a mark of how far it’s come. Elizabeth Nash reports from Madrid

Tuesday, 1 July 2008

Spain is enjoying a moment of glory. Last night’s triumphal homecoming of Euro 2008’s conquering heroes revealed everything that is good about Spaniards today, their spontaneity, their gregarious sociability, their unbridled â?? sometimes excessive â?? lust for partying.

The celebrations have shown something else: that Spain is enjoying a new confidence, a relaxed sense of national pride, a self-esteem it has rarely if ever experienced before, divested of old complexes. One of the commonest comments made by those celebrating Sunday’s victory was “I’m proud to be Spanish” and “I’ve never felt more Spanish”. And they said it without the defiance you used to hear, but naturally, with joy in their faces. They were not trying to convince you of their superiority. They were having fun.

And the reason for their new-found ease was that the old braggadocio that compensated for feeling small, dark, isolated from Europe, hopeless at languages, a failure at the game they loved, was replaced by the serene confidence they absorbed from their youthful footballers. No fake heroics, no swaggering, no assumed “Latin” passion, just the pride of a nation of small, dark blokes of humble origins who ran rings around the blond, cultured man-mountains of Europe’s mightiest footballing nation.

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