Join our Community
On July 25th, we hosted our Community Kickoff for the Funding Innovation Studio! Watch this short 20 minute video to learn more about this exciting and novel approach to increasing capital access and opportunity for women and people of color in the life sciences.
What is the Funding Innovation Studio?
The Funding Innovation Lab is a non-profit program founded by LabCentral and led by Beth McKeon, with a mission to increase funding access, opportunity, and inclusion for women and BIPOC founders in the life sciences.
The Funding Innovation Studio convenes and supports innovators from across VC, universities, and entrepreneurial support organizations, as they run rapid design sprints to solve the persistent systemic barriers and bias in the fundraising and capital deployment process. The Funding Innovation Studio has an open-source policy, sharing the wins and fails from these experiments here on Substack and with its community of practitioners with the goal to see widespread adoption and replication of emerging best practices in this field.
Our strategy and philosophy
The Funding Innovation Studio is our sandbox for testing and developing new playbooks for venture funding that are inclusive by design.
Tiny, fast experiments: We learn quickly and with very low effort or cost whether a change to the playbook creates more access and opportunity.
Inclusive design: We expect most successful interventions to create a net positive for all participants, not just the diverse founders we may have designed the intervention for originally.
Nudges: We’re looking for small changes that create the outcomes we want by default.
Systems, not individuals: The kinds of interventions we want to design should address the system. Instead of asking individuals to change their behavior, we want to find ways where the structure itself encourages the behaviors and actions we want to see.
The DARPA strategy: We’re taking inspiration from DARPA - creating temporary teams of experts to tackle a wicked hard problem.
What is LabCentral?
More than just lab space, LabCentral is a community designed to inspire collaboration, share ideas, and build the connections necessary to create a sustainable and thriving biotech and life sciences industry.
LabCentral has had tremendous impact, with resident companies raising over $18B in funding in the past ten years.
As a non-profit, LabCentral reinvests this success into opportunities that result in a return on innovation in service of human health, with a commitment to increasing the diversity and inclusion within the life sciences. That includes initiatives like the Funding Innovation Lab, Career Forge, and the Ignite Golden Ticket program.
Want to get involved?
Please join our community of practitioners and supporters!
The best way to do that is to subscribe to this newsletter. We’ll be open-sourcing our work and would love to include you in the process as well. The newsletter is the best way to find out about opportunities to get involved.
