INNOVATION AND DIVERSITY

The impact of cultural, gender, or organizational diversity on organizational performance has been in focus particularly since the acceleration of globalization in 1990s. In this paper, we concentrate on effects of diversity brought by academic-industrial collaboration. We used and extended the AIC Framework proposed in (Ministr & Pitner, 2016) towards diversity and enriched a former study showing the encouraging and distracting factors of AIC primarily on the example of CERIT Science Park at Masaryk University. Then we take one case study of AIC between university and an SME located in the Science Park, both collaborating on contractual research for major electricity distribution and transmission system operators. We will show how the collaboration works and identify aspects of diversity are the most influential in AIC.