Diversity of the Mind as the Key to Successful Creativity at Unilever

In contrast to the general belief that we need a diversity of people attending the creativity session in order to generate ideas, this article states that it is more important that the participants of the creativity session have a ‘diversity of the mind’ meaning they have the ability to think creatively. In the R&D environment of Unilever we have encountered many ways in which the diversity of participants and the environment of a creativity session have an impact on the results. Based on four years of experience, this article describes how diversity impacts creativity from a practitioner point of view.