Rotman professor, Sarah Kaplan, champions inclusive product and service innovation—for social good and competitive advantage—in this interview for IEDP. The idea that business innovations should appeal equally to everyone seems obvious, because it makes good business sense. Yet, in discussing Inclusive Business Innovation, her new program at the University of Toronto Kaplan tries to show how the commercial aspect follows from being more inclusive. “I sometimes resist the business case argument, because it downplays the importance of just being good for the community. But Inclusive Business Innovation is about win-wins.”  Unfortunately, this clear business and social win often does not happen.

Business leaders and policy makers often fail to consider how their policies, products, services and processes can have impacts on inequality. To unlock innovative opportunities using an intersectional gender lens, GATE joined with our Rotman partner, the TD Management and Data Analytics lab, to host a one-day conference called “Gender Analytics: Possibilities” (or GAP). This limited-edition GATE Audio productions podcast hosted by Sarah Kaplan shares panel conversations from the conference on topics like decolonizing data and design, inclusive government policy, responsible AI, and more.

Current conversations about diversity and inclusion often forget that these are not just talent management issues but affect how products, services and policies create outcomes that differ by gender, race, differences in ability, Indigeneity and other intersecting identities. In this talk, titled "Inclusive Product, Service and Policy Design: Flipping the Script on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion", Professor Sarah Kaplan shares the work of the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) to explore what inclusive design would look like. Using examples from across industries and sectors, we’ll examine how a more inclusive economy could be achieved by organizations.

It's tempting to think that an inclusive approach to analytics is just an add-on to a day-to-day job, or worse, isn't profitable. But those are all just myths, say GATE's Sarah Kaplan and Lechin Lu in an interview for the Rotman Insights Hub.

In this episode of Disruptive Conversations, Keita Demming speaks with Sarah Kaplan (PhD). Sarah is an innovation scholar at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. She has recently written the book The 360˚ Corporation. Today, Sarah works to explore how ideas from innovation can be applied in a way that helps to create a world of social and economic justice. Although much of her work focuses on gender equality, it is clear Sarah takes an intersectional approach to her work.

As we navigate this global pandemic and make plans to move forward, we’re realizing that striving for ‘back to normal’ or ‘business as usual’ isn’t good enough. “As the COVID-19 crisis and the recent Black Lives Matter protests have pointed out, ‘normal’ wasn’t so great for a lot of people,” explains Sarah Kaplan. In the latest Managing Uncertainty webinar — Build Back Better After COVID-19: Why Corporations Need a Radical Redesign — Kaplan and Professor Soo Min Toh, discuss what it means to build back better, and why rebuilding should be seen as an innovation challenge.

Conventional wisdom says brainstorming works best when people from different departments or groups come together to think of new ideas or solve problems. But in this interview for Knowledge@Wharton, Sarah Kaplan, a senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management, shares that diversity is not enough. What is also necessary is in-depth expertise of the topic at hand. Those two factors together result in truly innovative ideas and also yield the highest economic value.