What really makes the difference in innovation is whether the corporate culture is paying attention to innovation.

When you start paying attention to diversity, you notice it (and notice its absence!). And based on the culture of your upbringing and the culture of your organization, you may or may not be primed to think consciously about innovation.

The very ability to empathize with a user requires that I have an understanding of that user's value and needs. This is what leads to many product fails. The individuals developing the innovation don't actually use it.

The more diverse your team, the better you'll be at identifying what a diversity of users perceive as problems.

Given the increasing diversity among customers and employees, organizations that attend to cultural intelligence are more successful.

The better you work to find the pain point and problem facing a diversity of users, the more clearly you can DEFINE the goal when you implement the process for culturally intelligent innovation.

Developing an explicit decision-making process upfront for how you will make that decision will help alleviate conflict and gridlock when you actually need to decide.