The numbers don't lie: diverse teams are more innovative, and lead to a much higher ROI. In this video, I talk about the two types of diversity you should have on your team.

If you're a video person, I lay it all out in the video below. If reading is more your thing, skip the video and hop straight to the transcript below!

Hey everybody, Bill Stainton here with Turning Creativity into Money™, and today I want to talk about innovation and diversity.

It turns out—not at all surprisingly—there's a pretty strong correlation between innovation and diversity. And it basically comes down to this: the more diverse your team is, the more innovative your team is.

This kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Because if you've got a diverse team, that means the members of your team see the world differently from each other. So they're going to come up with different ideas based on their world experience.

Now there's two types of diversity we want to talk about here. There's inherent diversity, and acquired diversity.

Inherent diversity is what you're born with. Your ethnicity, your gender, those things. What you're born with.

Acquired diversity is, is based on the experiences that you've gathered throughout life. Have you traveled? Have you met lots of different people? Do you speak different languages? Do you read a wide diverse number of things? So this is based on your experience. How, do you see the world differently? Have you broadened your ideas of what the world is, based on the experiences, education, and insights that you've gathered along the way. That's acquired diversity.

And here's where it gets good.

Because it turns out that businesses whose leaders exhibit at least three traits from each of these two categories, are more innovative. The businesses are more innovative. Their employees are 45 percent more likely to increase market share within one year, and 70 percent more likely to win over new markets.

Now if you're a business leader, those numbers should excite you! If they don't, you may be a business leader—but you're not one of the good ones.

But those numbers make sense, don't they? If you've got a diverse team, it means your team sees the world differently than each other, which means that when you come up with an idea for a new product or service, your diverse team—because their, their, their diverse world views—can suggest ways that you can, that you can expand that product or that service to appeal to a broader cross-section of people, to a more diverse section of customer.

So it really, really pays to have a diverse team. It pays in ideas, it pays in creativity, it pays in raw numbers.

So if you want a more innovative team, if you want a business that's more innovative, that's coming up with cutting edge ideas that makes everybody else go, "Wow, what happened there? That's really cool!" the, one of the best ways you can do that, is to build a diverse team. Intentionally build a diverse team.

You're going to get more ideas, you're going to get better ideas, and you're going to show a better bottom line because of it.

I'm Bill Stainton. I'll be back next time with more ways that you can Turn Creativity into Money™.