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The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the implications of board human capital heterogeneity for company innovation by focusing on the educational and the functional background of directors. Moreover, it examines the moderating effect of the CEO expertise-overlap within the innovation domain on the relationship between board human capital heterogeneity and firm innovation.

The hypotheses are tested through a set of ordinary least squares regressions on a unique dataset of 149 Italian high-tech companies observed between 2012 and 2015.

Findings show that the educational and the functional background heterogeneity of directors increase both the innovation input and output. However, results highlight that these relationships are negatively moderated by the CEO expertise-overlap within the innovation domain.

The paper emphasizes the importance of appointing directors with different and specific educational and functional backgrounds to foster the company innovation.

The paper fills a gap in the literature as it has devoted limited attention to the performance implications of board human capital heterogeneity in the high-tech industry where knowledge and skills are the primary sources of value. Moreover, the paper integrates the research on the CEO-board interface by shedding light on how the CEO expertise within the innovation domain affects the contribution of heterogeneous boards to company innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Ontario principals make sense of difference within student populations and how this sensemaking influences how they do their work.

The paper reports on a qualitative study in Ontario, Canada that included 59 semistructured interviews with school principals from English public, secular school districts in Southern Ontario.

Four themes emerged in principals’ descriptions of student populations: perceiving everyone as the same, or homogeneous; perceiving visible differences associated with particular religions, race and cultures; perceiving invisible or less visible differences, such as academic differences, socioeconomic status, mental health issues, gender identity and sexual orientation; and perceiving both visible and less visible differences through an inclusive lens. When asked about how their understanding of difference influenced how they did their work, principals’ responses varied from not influencing their work at all to influencing practices and activities. Participants’ context – both personal and local – influenced some of the work they did in their role as school principal. Lastly, multiple sources of disconnect emerged between how principals understood difference and the practices that they engage in at their school site; between their sensemaking about difference and diversity and preparing students for the twenty-first century competencies as global citizens; and between principals’ understanding of difference and diversity and existing provincial policy.

Study insights not only contribute to an existing body of literature that examines principals’ sensemaking around difference, but also extend this line of inquiry to consider how this sensemaking influences their professional practice. These findings pose additional research questions about how to approach principal professional learning for inclusive and equitable education. For example, even though principals are contractually responsible for students in their care, why is it that their efforts toward equitable and inclusive schooling appear to be limited to the school site and not the wider community?

Study findings can be used to inform principal preparation programs and professional learning opportunities. Namely, these programs should provide the skill development required as well as the time needed for principals to reflect on their local context and beliefs, and to consider how their local context and beliefs are connected to larger societal efforts to create a more inclusive and equitable society.

School leadership is integral to creating and building more inclusive and equitable public education that improves all students’ success at school. As Ontario’s general population becomes increasingly diverse, it is imperative that principals support success for all students; this can only happen if they understand the complexity of difference within their student populations and beyond, how to address these complexities and how their own understandings and beliefs influence their leadership practices.

Although other papers have examined how principals make sense of difference and diversity in student bodies, this paper also explores how this sensemaking influences how school leaders do their work.

The aim of this article is to provide Dr Bailey Jackson's perspective on institutional and systemic barriers to full inclusion of diverse faculty in higher education through the lens of the multicultural organizational development (MCOD) model. Dr Jackson is renowned for his work on social justice, diversity and multiculturalism.

This is a personal interview with Dr Bailey Jackson. This interview provides insight on institutional level change efforts through the MCOD framework, a perspective on why institutions get stuck on the way to becoming healthy multicultural institutions, and the effect on moving the needle on faculty diversity in institutions of higher education.

The institutional obstacles and barriers tend to be centered around misalignment with the mission, vision and core values, and how those are formulated to include diversity and inclusion. Faculty diversity is only one component in dealing with the health of any organization or the academy as a whole. If institutions focus on diversity faculty in an unhealthy system, they will encounter limitations on how much the institution will develop on the MCOD continuum. The health of the overall system is going to affect the approach to faculty diversity.

Dr Jackson provides insight on his work with the MCOD framework and specifically the overall health of the institution as critical to faculty diversity initiatives. Questions to help institutions begin to assess themselves and identify changes required to move toward Multicultural within the context of faculty diversity are provided.

Through a series of questions, insight from Dr Jackson on why institutions get stuck in moving the needle on faculty diversity through the lens of the MCOD framework is gained.

High-growth firms generate a large share of new jobs and are thus the key drivers of innovation and industry dynamics. As the employees' education supports innovation and productivity, this article hypothesizes that employee competences explain high growth.

The study approaches this by examining intangible capital and specialized knowledge to evaluate how these characteristics support the probability of becoming a high-growth firm. The estimation uses linked employer–employee data from Danish registers from 2005 to 2013.

As the authors measure high growth with the size-neutral Birch index, they can examine the determinants of high growth across different firm size classes. The findings imply that intangible capital relates positively to the firm's high growth.

Previous research on high-growth firms is concentrated on the owners’ education. This article broadens to the high education of all employees and accounts for the employees’ occupation and capitalization of knowledge with intangible capital.

Boards presently are considered the most critical component in improving corporate governance (CG). Board diversity is increasingly being recommended as a tool for enhancing firm performance. Academic research and regulatory action regarding board diversity are focussed mainly on gender and ethnic composition of boards. However, the perspective of board members on board diversity and its impact is mostly missing. Moreover, while strategic leadership perspective suggests that a broader set of upper echelon’s characteristics may shape their actions, empirical evidence investigating the impact of less-explored attributes of diversity is almost non-existent. While the research on the input–output relationship between board diversity and firm performance remains equivocal, an intervening relationship between board diversity and board effectiveness needs to be understood. The purpose of this paper is to address all three limitations and explore the subject from board members’ perspective.

The paper presents the findings of qualitative, exploratory research conducted by interviewing 42 board members of FTSE 350 companies. The data are analysed thematically.

The findings of the research suggest that board members of FTSE 350 companies consider the diversity of functional experience to be a critical requirement for boards’ role-effectiveness. Functionally diverse boards manage external dependencies more effectively and challenge assumptions of the executive more efficiently, thus improving CG. The findings significantly contribute to the literature on board diversity, as well as to strategic leadership theory and other applicable theories. The research is conducted with a relatively small but elite and difficult to approach set of 42 board members of FTSE 350 companies.

The paper makes a unique and significant contribution to praxis by presenting the perspective of practitioners of CG – board members. The findings may encourage board nomination committees to seek board diversity beyond the gender and ethnic characteristics of directors. The findings may also be relevant for policy formulation, as they indicate that functionally diverse boards have improved effectiveness in a range of board roles.

Board diversity is about building a board that accurately reflects the make-up of the population and stakeholders of the society where the company operates. The aim of board diversity is to cultivate a broad range of attributes and perspectives that reflects real-world demographics as boards need to continue to earn their “licence to operate in society” as organisations have a responsibility to multiple constituents and stakeholders, including the community and the wider society within which they exist. Building social capital through diversity has value in the wider context of modern society and achieving social justice.

The paper makes an original and unique contribution to strategic leadership theory by strengthening the argument of the theory. The paper explores beyond widely researched attributes of gender and ethnicity on boards and explores the impact of a less-researched characteristic of directors – their functional experience. Moreover, the paper opens the “black box” of CG – boards, and presents the perspectives of board members. The findings indicate that board members in FTSE 350 boards define diversity more broadly than academics and regulatory agencies often do.

Mezirow's theory of transformative learning aims to evoke change on a deeper level of learning. This qualitative study with 38 pre-service teachers enrolled in a Master's degree programme for teacher education in Austria used semi-structured interviews to explore how diversity skills can transform after diversity training applying Mezirow's theory of transformative learning. In these trainings, a disorienting dilemma was placed at the centre of the diversity training from which transformative learning took its start.

In an increasingly diversified school system, diversity skills have become a pedagogical necessity for teachers in their future workplace. However, many teachers state not feeling adequately prepared for diversity within higher education and their attitudes towards diversity oftentimes remain unchanged despite diversity training.

The findings were deduced from structured content analysis. They show that the diversity trainings led to new cultural frames of reference for the study participants on a cognitive and social level, but to a smaller extent on an emotional level.

The study follows a different approach than “typical” diversity trainings through Mezirow's theory on transformative learning contributing to making a real change to preparing students for their workplaces in diversified Austrian schools.

In recent years, diversity and inclusion in higher education has become a topic of increased interest both nationally and internationally. Given the importance of this topic in today's world, it is surprising that the research is limited, especially with university students in the rural areas. This study examines on-campus students' perceptions of university diversity initiatives, and their value to the university environment.

Focus-group interviews with both undergraduate and graduate students from a public university in rural Michigan, USA, were conducted. Focus groups were used in this study because they are a particularly good method for generating discussion and stimulating ideas.

Overall, the participants identified several positive attitudes toward diversity and inclusion that included being accepting and respectful. However, it is significant that some participants are limited in their perceptions of culturally diverse backgrounds, which has resulted in some anxiety.

This study not only provides guidance to current institution administrators to create effective inclusive environments in their university. It can also be treated as a model for other rural universities, as building a successful inclusive environment in the future.