Creating Inclusive Impact

What if diversity, equity, inclusion and justice efforts were not only a moral imperative, but a source of breakthrough innovation? Inclusive impact brings diverse stakeholders together to build innovative products, services, and initiatives that also benefit society. It incorporates a broad approach that recognizes 10 different types of diversities, celebrates conflict as an important part of the brainstorming process, and embeds divergent thinking throughout the entire innovation pipeline. Inclusive impact goes beyond traditional DEIJ efforts, design thinking approaches, and corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Corporations, entrepreneurs, and non-profit organizations are utilizing inclusive impact’s process of cross-pollination, cultivating creativity, and co-creation in order to develop breakthrough innovation and simultaneously drive social change. Here's how:

Cross-Pollination is the act of exchanging ideas and unique solutions by gathering rich inputs from diverse teams. With the Inclusive impact framework, we broaden the definition of diversity to include 10 types of “multiple diversities.” Not only we do we need to incorporate traditional diversities such as race and ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and disability status but also aspects such as lived experience, age, socioeconomic background, political beliefs, and the introversion-extroversion continuum. These 10 multiple diversities are not only essential — they are intersectional. For example, students of color often attend less selective colleges and universities. At the same time, Ivy League students are more likely to come from the top 1% than the bottom 50% of families when it comes to income distribution. When companies favor graduates from the Ivy League and other top schools, they often miss out on talented students of color and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds — and there is a significant overlap between the two.

Cultivate Creativity. The second step in creating Inclusive Impact is to cultivate creativity. It's not enough to bring a diverse group together — we need to make sure those teams are working effectively together and bringing their most innovative ideas to the table. Teams can cultivate creativity in a number of ways. The first is playstorming, a form of brainstorming (traditionally used to improve video games) that unlocks both individual and collective imagination through prompts and activities.?Diverse teams also need to manage any potential tensions that arise when individuals from dramatically different backgrounds work together.

Co-Create. Inclusive impact thrives on a continuous stream of input from the people who are most closely affected by a particular challenge alongside more traditional experts who have academic, theoretical, or professional perspectives. In order to bring together the best of all worlds, we need to engage in co-creation. Design thinking, which approaches problem-solving with empathy at the start of the process, is not enough. We need to actively bring in different perspectives into the entire design, development, and implementation process.

Inclusive impact provides an integrated framework to achieve corporations’ DEIJ and corporate social responsibility goals as well as business objectives. When we integrate diverse stakeholders through cross-pollination, cultivating creativity, and co-creation, opportunities are rife for innovation and growth as well as societal and environmental progress.

?