Impact of workforce diversity and participation on business innovation: A two-stage regression model for the service secto
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15359/peds.1-1.2Keywords:
diversity by sex, spaces for participation in firms, innovation on servicesAbstract
Traditionally, innovation processes have been linked to investments in research and development (R&D) or investments in staff training. This has led to studies on innovation focusing on aspects of technological advancement, somewhat neglecting incremental processes of change and improvement that eventually translate into substantial transformations in companies. This article attempts to determine the effect of other factors, such as diversity and worker participation, on innovation in companies. The diversity factor addresses aspects of the composition of the workforce in terms of gender and educational level, while the participation factor has to do with spaces for discussing ideas, the origin of the initiative for participation in change processes, and involvement in different phases of innovative processes. Using a Heckman regression model, we seek to determine in two stages the implications of the variables mentioned above on innovation in companies in the service sector. The first section conceptualizes the term innovation. The second section focuses on explaining the theoretical links between the selected variables and innovation, together with descriptive statistics that show the behavior of the variables. A third section is devoted to the specification of the model, and the fourth section presents the main results, concluding with policy implications that arise from the model's own results.
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