The paradox of diversity's influence on the creative teams Lessons learned from the analysis of 14 editions of 'The 24h of innovation' hackathon

International audience ; The main objective of this paper is to understand the mindset and characteristics of a team in order to foster creative and innovative thinking. Especially, we want to analyse the influence of the diversity of scholar's affiliation within student's team on their performance during early design phase. For that purpose, we focus on one innovative event to foster creativity and design thinking of students during 24 hours design phase. This event is 'The 24h of innovation®" challenge which is an event created by the institute of technology ESTIA in Biarritz since 2007 (http://24h.estia.fr). During the period 2007-2019, we have organized 14 French editions and we collected the data of profile's participants in order to characterise the team's diversity. The paper demonstrates the paradox of the diversity that can increase sometimes positively the average team performance, but also the non-diversity can be a positive factor for the team excellence