Beyond Technological Diversification: The Impact of Employee Diversity on Innovation

Christian Østergaard (), Bram Timmermans and Kari Kristinsson

No 09-03, DRUID Working Papers from DRUID, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy/Aalborg University, Department of Business Studies

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of employee diversity in terms of gender, age, ethnicity and education on the firm’s likelihood of introducing an innovation. The analysis draws on data from a recent innovation survey. This data is merged with a linked employer-employee dataset that allow us to identify the employee composition of each firm. We test the hypothesis that employee diversity is associated with better innovative performance. The econometric analysis reveals positive, negative and non-significant effects of the different employee characteristics on the likelihood of introducing an innovation.

Keywords: Diversity; Innovation; Education; Gender; Cultural Backgrund (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-hrm, nep-ino, nep-knm and nep-sbm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://wp.druid.dk/wp/20090003.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aal:abbswp:09-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DRUID Working Papers from DRUID, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy/Aalborg University, Department of Business Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Keld Laursen ().