ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emerging perspective on diversity in the academy, where intellectual innovations often occur through collaborative effort by teams of researchers, including graduate and, increasingly, undergraduate students. It integrates multiple perspectives-including absorptive capacity, functional diversity, and cognitive complexity-to propose a model that represents how diverse identities shape knowledge creation through specific communication processes. Cohen and Levinthal's absorptive capacity (AC) framework unpacks diversity's impact on learning, innovation, and knowledge generation. In a research context, diverse cognitive roles may enhance team effectiveness by finding synergies in the groups functional and knowledge diversity, and by enacting communication processes that AC theory asserts are central to innovation. These roles feed cognitive diversity and enhance group performance by facilitating communication, which absorptive capacity theory claims is a critical precondition of innovation. Shared commitment to diversity and the development of intercultural effectiveness both shape the possibility that diversity can realize its potential in sparking creativity and innovation.
