The relationship between team gender diversity, idea variety, and potential for design innovation

Design teams are commonly formed in engineering courses with the expectation that gender diversity will lead to more innovativesolutions, but few studies have examined this relationship. In this study, we investigated whether the variety of ideas and theinnovative qualities of team design solutions are related to team gender diversity. The research participants were 148 engineeringstudents working in 37 teams. These teams were identified as gender balanced or all-male based on their gender composition. Theiridea generation outcomes and final design solutions were evaluated using an established variety metric and a new innovationpotential metric developed by the authors. The innovative potential, variety scores, and correlation between variety and innovationpotential were compared with respect to team gender diversity. The results indicated that gender balanced teams were no moreinnovative than all-male teams, nor were there any significant differences in the variety of alternative solutions between the twogroups. Gender balanced teams, however, did demonstrate a strong positive correlation between variety and innovation potential.Results suggest that diversity, defined by gender alone, may not increase the innovation potential of student design teams but maysupport innovation in the presence of other factors. Efforts should focus on helping teams better utilize their diversity to improvetheir ability to be innovative.