Diverse voices and perspectives bring innovation to their organizations, but the people offering them don’t necessarily get credit or support for doing so.

Business scholars have been studying this phenomenon for years and making the case that investing in diverse talent boosts an institution’s bottom line.

A new study makes the same argument about academe: diversity is good for business. But instead of profit, the metric of choice here is research innovation.

The findings are at once promising and sobering. Scholars from underrepresented groups, as a whole, achieve higher rates of scientific novelty, the study says. Yet novel contributions by gender and racial minorities are less likely to be taken up by their peers than are novel contributions by those in the majority.