TY - CHAP A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Sharma, Mamta Rameshwarlal A1 - Bleck, Wolfgang A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen ED - Farn, C. K. T1 - Innovation through Diversity - Development of a Diversity and Innovation management concept T2 - International Conference on Innovation and Management : IAM23017S : Date: July 4-7, 2017, Osaka, Japan N2 - Acknowledging that a diverse workforce could be a potential source of innovation, the current research deals with the fine details of why diversity management is central to achieving innovation in heterogeneous research groups and how this could be effectively realized in an organization. The types of heterogeneities addressed mainly include gender, qualification, academic discipline and intercultural perspectives. The type of organization being dealt with in this work is a complex association of research institutes at a technical university in Germany (RWTH Aachen University), namely a 'Cluster of Excellence', whereby several institutes of the university work collaboratively in different sub-projects. The 'Cluster of Excellence' is a part of the 'Excellence Initiative' of the German federal and state governments German Research Foundation (DFG) and German Council of Science and Humanities, with the ultimate aim of promoting cutting-edge research. To support interdisciplinary collaboration and thus the performance of the cluster, the development of a diversity and innovation management concept is presently in the conceptual phase and will be described in the frame of this paper. The 3-S-Diversity Model, composed of the three elements: skills, structure and strategy, serves as a basis for the development of the concept. The proposed concept consists of six phases; the first two phases lay the ground work by developing an understanding of the status quo on the forms of diversity in the Cluster of Excellence, the type of organizational structure of the member institutes and the varieties of specialist work cultures of the same. The third and the fourth phases build up on this foundation by means of qualitative and quantitative studies. While the third phase deals with the sensitization of the management level to the close connection between diversity and innovation; the need to manage them thereafter and find tailor-made methods of doing so, the fourth phase shall mainly focus on the mindset of the employees in this regard. The fifth phase shall consolidate the learnings and the ideas developed in the course of the first four phases into an implementable strategy. The ultimate phase shall be the implementation of this concept in the Cluster. The first three phases have been accomplished successfully and the preliminary results are already available. Y1 - 2017 SN - 2218-6387 SP - Panel C PB - Kuang Hui Chiu CY - Osaka ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen ED - Tipurić, Darko ED - Hruška, Domagoj T1 - Diversity- and innovation management in complex engineering organizations T2 - 7th International OFEL Conference on Governance, Management and Entrepreneurship: Embracing Diversity in Organisations. April 5th - 6th, 2019, Dubrovnik, Croatia N2 - Diversity is increasingly being addressed as an innovation-promoting factor. For this reason, companies and institutions tackle the integration of a diversity management approach that enables a heterogenic perspective on innovation development. However, system-theoretical frameworks state that the implementation of diversity measures that are not tailored to the needs of the organization often leads to a rejection or reactivity with regard to the management approach. In this context, especially organizations, which are characterized by a specific hierarchical structure, a dominant habitus or specialist culture, must face the challenge of realizing a sustainable change of the corporate culture that sets the basis for implementing diversity management approaches. The presented research project focuses on analyzing the situation in a huge scientific collaborative project - so called Cluster of Excellence (CoE) - with the aim to implement a diversity - and innovation management strategy. Considering the influencing determinants, the CoE is characterized by its embeddedness in the scientific system, a complex organizational structure, and a high fluctuation rate. The paper presents a systemic approach of reflecting these factors in order to develop a diversity- and innovation management strategy. In this frame, the results of a quantitative survey of CoE employees and derived mindset-types are presented. The results show a need for taking different mindset-types into account, to be able to develop a tailored management strategy. The aim of the project is to give recommendations for developing a sustainable management concept that promotes both diversity and innovation by drawing on the persisting mindsets of organization members while reflecting top down as well as bottom up factors of implementation processes as well as the psychology of change. This paper addresses all who are concerned with the management of human resources in innovation processes and are striving for a cultural change within the framework of complex organizations. KW - Change Management KW - Corporate Culture KW - Diversity Management KW - Engineering KW - Innovation Management Y1 - 2019 SP - 136 EP - 157 PB - Governance Research and Development Centre (CIRU) CY - Zagreb ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - Perceiving diversity : an explorative approach in a complex research organization. T2 - Diversity and discrimination in research organizations N2 - Diversity management is seen as a decisive factor for ensuring the development of socially responsible innovations (Beacham and Shambaugh, 2011; Sonntag, 2014; López, 2015; Uebernickel et al., 2015). However, many diversity management approaches fail due to a one-sided consideration of diversity (Thomas and Ely, 2019) and a lacking linkage between the prevailing organizational culture and the perception of diversity in the respective organization. Reflecting the importance of diverse perspectives, research institutions have a special responsibility to actively deal with diversity, as they are publicly funded institutions that drive socially relevant development and educate future generations of developers, leaders and decision-makers. Nevertheless, only a few studies have so far dealt with the influence of the special framework conditions of the science system on diversity management. Focusing on the interdependency of the organizational culture and diversity management especially in a university research environment, this chapter aims in a first step to provide a theoretical perspective on the framework conditions of a complex research organization in Germany in order to understand the system-specific factors influencing diversity management. In a second step, an exploratory cluster analysis is presented, investigating the perception of diversity and possible influencing factors moderating this perception in a scientific organization. Combining both steps, the results show specific mechanisms and structures of the university research environment that have an impact on diversity management and rigidify structural barriers preventing an increase of diversity. The quantitative study also points out that the management level takes on a special role model function in the scientific system and thus has an influence on the perception of diversity. Consequently, when developing diversity management approaches in research organizations, it is necessary to consider the top-down direction of action, the special nature of organizational structures in the university research environment as well as the special role of the professorial level as role model for the scientific staff. KW - Diversity management KW - Organizational culture KW - Change management KW - Psychological concepts KW - Perception Y1 - 2022 SN - 978-1-80117-959-1 (Print) SN - 978-1-80117-956-0 (Online) U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-956-020221010 SP - 365 EP - 392 PB - Emerald Publishing Limited CY - Bingley ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - Social responsibility and innovation - Key competencies for engineers T2 - ICERI 2016: 9th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation: Conference Proceedings : Seville (Spain), 14-16 November N2 - Engineers are of particular importance for the societies of tomorrow. The big social challenges society has to cope with in future, can only be mastered, if engineers link the development and innovation process closely with the requirements of people. As a result, in the frame of the innovation process engineers have to design and develop products for diverse users. Therefore, the consideration of diversity in this process is a core competence engineers should have. Implementing the consideration of diverse requirements into product design is also linked to the development of sustainable products and thus leads to social responsible research and development, the core concept formulated by the EU. For this reason, future engineers should be educated to look at the technical perspectives of a problem embedded in the related questions within societies they are developing their artefacts for. As a result, the aim of teaching engineering should be to prepare engineers for these requirements and to draw attention to the diverse needs in a globalized world. To match the competence profiles of future engineers to the global challenges and the resulting social responsibility, RWTH Aachen University, one of the leading technical universities in Germany, has established the bridging professorship “Gender and Diversity in Engineering” (GDI) which educates engineers with an interdisciplinary approach to expand engineering limits. The interdisciplinary teaching concept of the research group pursues an approach which imparts an application oriented Gender and Diversity expertise to future engineers. In the frame of an established teaching concept, which is a result of experiences and expertise of the research group, students gain theoretical knowledge about Gender and Diversity and learn how to transfer their knowledge into their later field of action. In the frame of the conference the institutional approach will be presented as well as the teaching concept which will be introduced by concrete course examples. KW - diversity KW - innovation KW - social responsible engineering KW - engineering education Y1 - 2016 SN - 978-84-617-5895-1 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2016.0353 SN - 2340-1095 SP - 5967 EP - 5976 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - Innovation and Diversity : Integrating new perspectives into research associations T2 - 12th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (ECIE 2017) : Paris, France, 21-22 September 2017 N2 - The link between diversity and innovation is broadly discussed in the context of research and innovation processes. Many institutions and enterprises, specifically in commerce, have already tried to establish sustainable diversity management concepts, in order to increase the diversity of their workforce in addition to establishing a corporate culture of openness. Alongside the creation of a working place where different experiences and skills are valued equally, the entrepreneurial intention is to transfer diversity into economically relevant advantages. Taking into account the potential of diversity in research and innovation processes, the project “Diversity- and Innovation Management” was incorporated within a large interdisciplinary research Cluster. The project’s purpose was to study the context between diversity and innovation in research associations and to later develop a customised management concept into an interdisciplinary research Cluster on integrative production technology with full integration. The challenge of such research associations lays in an organisational structure which is often described as being decentralised. Researchers coming from different academic disciplines, while having diverse habits, conduct research on large scientific issues and challenges. In addition, these researchers are socialised in different institutions and university chairs. Theses differences in leadership styles, business cultures and organisational strategies, follow into their research team work. Taking a closer look into the management of human resources suggests that decentral organised recruitment processes, as well as allocation of human resources, lead to a lacking overview in regard to missing competencies, perspectives and backgrounds in research networks. These circumstances are comparable to big corporate groups. While developing a management concept for research associations, these characteristics must be considered. To ensure this, the project follows a human-centred approach, which considers top-down, as well as bottom-up perspectives. This paper presents the applied mixed-method approach in the scientific issue described above. In the frame of the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries” research results based on quantitative, as well as qualitative studies, were presented as an application example. This paper provides a new perspective on the innovation and diversity context. Against the background of complex research organisations, the development approach of a management concept is particularly interesting. KW - Innovation KW - Diversity KW - Innovation Management KW - Diversity Management KW - Leadership Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-911218-54-8 SP - 767 EP - 776 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Gilmartin, Shannon K. A1 - Muller, Carol B. A1 - Dungs, Carolin A1 - Sheppard, Sheri A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - Expanding engineering limits : a concept for socially responsible education of engineers JF - The international journal of engineering education Y1 - 2019 SN - 0949-149X VL - 35 IS - 2 SP - 658 EP - 673 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Bouffier, Anna A1 - Gaedicke, Sonja A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - Diversifying engineering education: a transdisciplinary approach from RWTH Aachen University T2 - Strategies for increasing diversity in engineering majors and careers N2 - Engineers and therefore engineering education are challenged by the increasing complexity of questions to be answered globally. The education of future engineers therefore has to answer with curriculums that build up relevant skills. This chapter will give an example how to bring engineering and social responsibility successful together to build engineers of tomorrow. Through the integration of gender and diversity perspectives, engineering research and teaching is expanded with new perspectives and contents providing an important potential for innovation. Aiming on the enhancement of engineering education with distinctive competencies beyond technical expertise, the teaching approach introduced in the chapter represents key factors to ensure that coming generations of engineers will be able to meet the requirements and challenges a changing globalized world holds for them. The chapter will describe how this approach successfully has been implemented in the curriculum in engineering of a leading technical university in Germany. Y1 - 2017 SN - 9781522522126 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-2212-6.ch010 SP - 201 EP - 235 PB - IGI Global CY - Hershey, USA ER - TY - GEN A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Bernhard, Sebastian A1 - Langolf, Jessica A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - Managing change and acceptance of digitalization strategies - Implementing the vision of „Internet of Production“ (IoP) in existing corporate structures T2 - Textile Impulse für die Zukunft: Aachen-Dresden-Denkendorf International Textile Conference 2022 : 1. – 2. Dezember 2022, Eurogress Aachen N2 - The vision of the Internet of Production is to enable a new level of crossdomain collaboration by providing semantically adequate and context-aware data from production, development & usage in real-time. Y1 - 2022 SP - 153 EP - 153 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Bernhard, Sebastian A1 - Langolf, Jessica A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - About the paradox of sustainable production and what we can do about it! T2 - Joint SCORAI-ERSCP-WUR conference on transforming consumption-production systems toward just and sustainable futures (SCP23), July 5-8, 2023, Wageningen, The Netherlands N2 - Sustainability is playing an increasingly important role. Not least due to the definition of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the framework of the agenda 2030 by the United Nations (UN) in 2015 (United Nations, n.d.), it has become clear that the cooperation of different actors is needed to achieve the defined 17 goals. Industry, as a global actor, has a special role to play in this. In the course of sustainable production processes and chains, the industry is confronted with the responsibility of reflecting on the consequences of its own trade on an ecological, economic, and also social level and deriving measures that, according to the definition of sustainability (Hauff, 1987), will also enable future generations to satisfy their needs. While the ecological pillar of sustainability is already being addressed by different industrial initiatives (Deloitte, 2021), it is questionable to what extent the economic and, above all, the social pillars of sustainability also play a decisive role. Accordingly, it is questionable to what extent sustainability in its triad of social, ecological, and economic aspects is taken into account holistically at all, and thus to what extent the industry contributes to achieving the 17 goals defined by the UN. This paper presents a qualitative study that explores these questions. Interviewing 31 representatives from the manufacturing industry in Germany, results indicate a Paradox of Sustainable Production expressed by a theoretical reflection of the need for focusing on people in production processes on the one hand and a lack of addressing the social pillar of sustainability in concepts on the other hand. However, while it is a troublesome finding given the striking need for sustainable development (The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2022; Kropp 2019; von Hauff 2021; Roy and Singh 2017), the paradox directly lays out a path of resolving it. This is because, given its nature, we can see that we could resolve it via the implementation of strong educational efforts trying to help the respective people of the manufacturing industry to understand the holistic and interdependent character of sustainable development (The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2022). Y1 - 2023 N1 - Volltext auf dem Opus-Server verfügbar ER - TY - GEN A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Berg-Postweiler, Julia A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - One does not fit all: applying anti-bias trainings in academia T2 - Twenty-third international conference on diversity in organizations, communities & nations June 22 - 23, 2023 Toronto Metropolitan University, Rogers Communication Centre Toronto, Canada N2 - Anti-bias trainings are increasingly demanded and practiced in academia and industry to increase employees’ sensitivity to discrimination, racism, and diversity. Under the heading of “Diversity Management”, anti-bias trainings are mainly offered as one-off workshops intending to raise awareness of unconscious biases, create a diversity-affirming corporate culture, awake awareness of the potential of diversity, and ultimately enable the reflection of diversity in development processes. However, coming from childhood education, research and scientific articles on the sustainable effectiveness of anti-bias in adulthood, especially in academia, are very scarce. In order to fill this research gap, the paper explores how sustainable the effects of individual anti-bias trainings on the behavior of participants are. In order to investigate this, participant observation in a qualitative pre-post setting was conducted, analyzing anti-bias trainings in an academic context. Two observers actively participated in the training sessions and documented the activities and reflection processes of the participants. Overall, the results question the effectiveness of single anti-bias trainings and show that a target-group adaptive approach is mandatory due to the background of the approach in early childhood education. Therefore, it can be concluded that anti-bias work needs to be adapted to the target group’s needs and reality of life. Furthermore, the study reveals that single anti-bias trainings must be embedded in a holistic diversity management approach to stimulate sustainable reflection processes among the target group. This paper is one of the first to scientifically evaluate anti-bias training effectiveness, especially in engineering sciences and the university context. KW - Academia KW - Engineering Habitus KW - Organizational Culture KW - Diversity Management KW - Anti-Bias Y1 - 2023 ER -