Research by three Elon University professors will be presented this month at a European conference that brings together the world’s leading experts on the way creativity affects economic growth. Tom Tiemann travels to Brussels to share work done with Tina Das and Casey DiRienzo on the role of diversity in fueling innovation.
Hosted by the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning, an arm of Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the conference theme – “Can creativity be measured?” – asks guests to think of ways for comparing creativity among individuals and, on a larger scale, between nations.
Tiemann’s session examines tolerance among a nation’s people for others from different backgrounds. Two conclusions are drawn from the trio’s scholarship.
“First, creativity is often the result of transferring ideas from one industry to another, from one culture to another, or from one place to another,” according to his abstract. “Second, more tolerant societies are populated by individuals more open to new combinations of ideas and therefore (are) often more creative.”
Tiemann, Das and DiRienzo are among the few Americans to be invited, in large part because of their research in recent years to address such issues.
For instance:
• The professors published a 2006 article in the journal Challenge looking at the ethnic diversity of 149 nations and corresponding GDP data, a measure of economic growth. In “A Note on an Ethnic Homogenity Kuznets Curve,” they discovered that the poorest nations are ethnically diverse with residents of different races, religions and values. In countries just getting their industries off the ground, diversity – “heterogeneity,” in the language of the article – appears to decrease. But in the richest nations like the United States, populations again diversify.
“These nations are probably already deindustrializing,” the professors conclude. “An ethnically diverse population offering new products, service, and methods of management will foster even higher levels of economic growth and development.”
• In 2008, Tiemann, Das and DiRienzo again teamed up to publish “A Global Tolerance Index” in The Competitiveness Review, another international journal. In this study, they constructed a index of tolerance for 62 countries and used their index to find that more tolerant countries tend to attract more migrants, have a greater concentration of talented workers, have higher levels of economic development, and are more competitive.
The findings imply that firms needing to attract talented workers should look toward more tolerant nations and develop work environments that encourage acceptance of differences.
Tiemann says their findings make sense from a development perspective. When a nation is poor, regardless of diversity, it is rarely able to improve conditions that foster growth. But for emerging economies that rely on manufacturing and other industries, homogeneity is bad since it can raise tensions between groups of people who need to be working efficiently in factories to produce goods.
Yet once a nation like the United States moves away from manufacturing and into an information or service economy – think technology or medicine – diversity is again good, since a wide array of backgrounds can spur creative thinking.
“We have all the goods we already need – food, clothing and shelter,” he said. “This isn’t really fancy stuff. The statistics are pretty simple.”
Tiemann makes his presentation on May 28.
For more information about the conference and the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning, visit the link to the right of this page under the E-Cast section.