An organizational education program will be presented, where Innovation Labs with the goal of regional innovation for sustainable development have been conducted with the participation of regional stakeholders (Heidelmann et al., 2023/forthcoming). The diversity of the participants can be seen on the level of the subject, in the sense of attributes like organizational background, knowledge, class, 'race', and gender. Coming from a Foucauldian (1972) perspective, the paper addresses diversity as a 'discourse diversity’ in the sense that diversity is not so much a question of identity, but a question of (contradictory) discourses (Lyotard, 1994; Koller, 2012). The participating regional Stakeholders, in that sense, are seen as ‘discourse agents’ (Weber et al., 2019). The experience of diversity as experiencing another contradictory discourse to one's own provides the opportunity for learning processes, where the given order (or a world- and self-relation) is questioned through situations of foreignness and the necessity of educational processes arises. Foreignness can thus become the initial impulse for transformational educational processes in learning spaces characterized by diversity and plurality. In the context of Innovation Labs, where a multitude of actors work together in a problem-oriented way and where diversity is the norm, not the exception, this principle becomes the decisive occasion for plural educational processes (Heidelmann, 2023). The paper will present the theoretical foundations of a possible connection between diversity and experiences of foreignness and empirical findings from a longitudinal study conducted in the context of the program. Regarding this findings of a discourse-oriented analysis (Karl, 2007) of biographical interviews with participating stakeholders, it becomes clear that regional stakeholders emphasize the dialogical handling of the difference between contradictory positions and, therefore, discourses within Innovation Labs, which thus become a unique experience (Heidelmann & Klös, 2023/forthcoming). As a result, Innovation Labs can provide a 'Third Space' (Bhabha, 2003), a creative space 'in between' (Buchanan, 2010), and for the articulation and cohesion of contradictory discourses as an iterative 'place of understanding' (Hörster et al., 2004; Weber & Heidelmann, 2021).

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