I’ve talked a lot about my vision for the future of venture funding we are creating together here at the Funding Innovation Lab - one where women and people of color are included on purpose and by design, where the very best innovations and the most talented founders can access the capital they need.
But how can we actually achieve this vision if we don’t have a clear picture of what this future looks like or how we will all behave and respond? As the elite athletes of the funding “sport”, we need new playbooks and imagery.
One way the Funding Innovation Lab solves for this is through our tiny, fast experiments. As we start to publish our results (starting October 30th!), we will have access to specific, data-backed recommendations we can start to put into practice.
And…at the same time, we can, right now, take inspiration from a technique called “Artifacts from the Future” to help us see the way forward. Artifacts from the Future “can be everyday objects, such as a picture, a piece of clothing or a traffic sign. They can represent specific, concrete details about the future. They help people see and feel how the changes that we are experiencing today could translate into new ways of doing things.”
Here’s a real-life example of a Funding-Focused “Artifact from the Future” that I found on LinkedIn recently:
I would label the “52 page PDF” of detailed feedback as an “Artifact from the Future”. It’s not currently standard best practice, but is instead something that Harlem Capital has innovated.
And as the founder who posted this states: “It was clear that they wanted to see us win, even if they weren’t the ones to make it happen. This showed that their commitment to supporting Black founders goes beyond just funding; it’s about empowering us with the tools and insights needed to succeed.”
There is inspiration to take from this innovation from Harlem Capital. The Funding Innovation Lab could take this Artifact and identify probably two or three different experiments (at least!) from their approach to see if it should become a recommendation or future best practice.
Lots of people and organizations are already producing Artifacts from the Future. Keep your eyes open for places where your colleagues are trying something different, especially with the benefit of diverse founders in mind. Where are you already trying something different?
All of these Artifacts can become inspiration for future experiments and for a groundswell of adoption of new best practices.
Do you already have some in mind? Drop a comment on this post and share your examples!
2024 Sprint Progress Update
The Funding Innovation Lab is live and actively working on experiments now! We will be keeping you updated on our progress with this weekly Progress Update section.
Phase 1: Design the Sprints for 2024 (July-August)
July 25: We announced the focus areas for this year’s two sprints at our Kickoff event
August 6: We finalized the sprint design teams and scheduled the meetings where these teams will determine what/how/when we will run these experiments
Next: Convene and facilitate the sprint design meetings
Phase 2: Facilitate the Sprints (September)
Details TBD
Phase 3: Open source the Sprint Results (October)
Save the date for our Summit and Results Reveal Party!
October 30th in Cambridge MA (registration coming soon)
Subscribe to LabCentral’s Funding Innovation Lab newsletter! Each Wednesday, we share a quick note from Beth McKeon, as well as timely content to spark ideas and conversations about how the Funding Innovation Lab can identify critical challenges in the biotech funding model, rapidly test potential interventions, and share results with our community.
What we’re reading
The Funding Innovation Lab relies on a large body of scholarship and research-backed approaches. Each week, we’ll share snippets from the sources we’re reading/watching that provide inspiration for the kinds of experiments we may run in the future.
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to study with Jane McGonigal at Stanford University. Jane is a professional futurist at the Institute for the Future where she often works with business and government leaders to create visions and models for the future.
I highly recommend her Aspen Ideas Festival (60 min) talk as an introduction to this kind of future-thinking activity.
And even if you don’t have time to watch the full talk, check out the Remembering the Future exercise she demonstrates here. (We did a version of this exercise together during the Funding Innovation Lab Community Kickoff event too.)
She describes the power of deliberately imagining a future that hasn’t happened yet, both for the creativity it sparks and because it increases the likelihood of achieving that future.
“Every time you imagine a future that hasn't actually happened, that future becomes more likely. The more vivid the details that you describe about that future that hasn't happened, the more likely you are to believe it could happen.
You start to believe it is possible.”
- Jane McGonigal, Institute for the Future
The Funding Innovation Lab is a non-profit program, founded by LabCentral and led by Beth McKeon, with a mission to increase funding inclusion, access, and opportunity funding for women and BIPOC founders in the life sciences.
The Funding Innovation Lab 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 Lab 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.