Building Local Innovation Environment through Diversity Management

The project aims to enhance the capacity of regional SMEs to employ, lead and manage a diverse work community, which in turn enables the development of a local innovation environment.

In South Ostrobothnia, the population is aging, the skilled workforce is moving to cities, and young graduates, especially highly educated women, are moving out of the region. In 2019, South Ostrobothnia was the least international region in Finland. At the same time, the region wants to reform its business and support its competitiveness. This means that South Ostrobothnia must be able to offer diverse job opportunities so that the skilled workforce stays in the region. This requires an attitudinal and structural capacity to employ a diverse workforce. If companies focus on hiring the same workforce as they have hired in the past, opportunities for development will be lost and possible new ideas and innovations that new types of employees could bring to companies stays unused. According to research, diversity is a key driver of innovation.

The project studies the initial situation of diversity management in South Ostrobothnia and interviews successful diversity managers who have taken into account the position of either immigrants, the elderly or recent graduates in the work community. In this way, both the challenges and good practices in South Ostrobothnia related to strengthening the diversity of the workforce are identified and described.

Based on the information received, co-creation workshops will be organized for companies in South Ostrobothnia so that they can learn and develop their diversity management together with other companies and various stakeholders. In addition, the project aims to launch and sustain a public discussion on diversity management in the region, so that the discussion can also drive change in the local innovation environment. Finally, a report on the project's output is compiled and material suitable for companies is made. Material for SME’s contains the most important results, examples and good practices of the project, and is made so that it is easy for companies to utilize the material. The project will also host a final seminar.

This project is co-funded by the European Union.