Bidiversity

The facts

Our brain consists over 180 billion neurons, each processing information through 15,000 synapses per second. So as to be efficient and save energy, the brain “cheats” and creates shortcuts for processing information. Imagination, and consequently innovation, requires for the brain to break from past experiences, and to experience new visual stimuli as well as be forced to think in a different way.

As the brain structures of men and women are different in a number of ways, one of the most prominent being the 20 million more axonic fibres (nerve fibres) in the connecting fibres of the corpus collusum (the highway that connects the left and the right hemispheres). Women, in general, tend to have mental preferences that utilise the right brain, and men the left. As a result, we see some of the typical “male” behaviours and values around hierarchy, rationality, logic which pre-dominate the world of business with typical “feminine” values of flat structures, community support and inter-personal management lagging behind.

Experiments in innovation undertaken both by MIT and London Business School, have identified that teams with equal representation of both genders are more likely to create innovative solutions for specific business issues, reflecting the importance (and complementarity) of this heterogeneity.

Research in the University of Michigan has taken this one step further. Individuals who were able to positively re-affirm their multi-culturality (an African American in the US, or a woman in a male-dominated Engineering environment), and had higher levels of “identity integration”, displayed higher levels of creativity when problems require that they draw on their different realms of knowledge.

The Vision

We believe that diversity leads to innovation through: the cross-fertilising of ideas, values, experiences between multi-cultural and diverse teams. As such, bidiversity is a platform through which this cross-fertilisation happens between natural innovators or entrepreneurs, academia and large businesses.

The Process

The five pillars of bidiversity (Share, Create, Inspire, Connect, Learn) cover different catalytic experiences to make this cross-fertilisation happen, which constitute the 5 pillars: Read more here.

Bidiversity is in the process of developing the events and infrastructure to make the above possible. Current economic challenges have highlighted the need for a new world order, where innovation is reaped from and sustained within internal corporate processes.

The People

Bidiversity, and its proud sponsor, Aquitude, is working with Strathclyde Entrepreneurial Network, and developing partnerships with hubs of entrepreneurship and innovation.

We have had enormous interest from large businesses and professional individuals to be involved in the development of the pillars. We are welcoming support from your organisation. We invite you to consider:

• Event sponsorship opportunities
• On-line brand association/advertising
• Individual involvement from your internal staff – for their personal development and engagement

At Aquitude, we believe that competitive advantage will be achieved only by those companies who create the conditions to support diversity of thought and innovation quickly and flexibly. Our experience has been that the status-quo can only be changed from internal resources; there is no time is better than the present to engage staff in innovation-boosting and perception-challenging experiences.