Meet our sprint designers: Tracy & Vinit
News from the Funding Innovation Lab: September 11, 2024, Edition 12
We are deep in the work now of facilitating our two sprints. Please meet two more of our sprint designers - Tracy Warren and Vinit Nijhawan! We are so thankful for their contributions of time, expertise, and creativity.
Tracy Warren
Tracy Warren is the venture capital manager at Healthworx Ventures.
With a diverse career as a venture-backed CEO of a Healthtech company and an early-stage investor in health and life sciences, Tracy provides a unique perspective from "both sides of the table" on how capital is deployed, the challenges faced by female entrepreneurs and the requirements to attract investment in an impartial way. She has come to understand not only the scientific and technical challenges in health care, but also the stance of the key parties - companies and investors - and how to cross the chasm.
Tracy shared her thoughts on the work of the Funding Innovation Lab:
Tracy, why is the work of creating more funding access and opportunity important to you?
I've spent the past two decades looking to invest in technologies that will change the future of health. That includes the health of all persons. Creating more funding access is important so that solutions developed come from the persons who have experienced various challenges within our health care and life sciences sector and give unique, innovative perspectives.
Now that you have participated in helping to design an experiment for the Funding Innovation Lab, can you speak to why you chose to get involved with this work and/or what you find exciting about this approach?
The venture and entrepreneurial ecosystems are plagued by hearsay and perceptions, but changing mindset takes data - it is the great equalizer. Foundational studies that control for variables and create meaningful, actionable insights is the only way to change the narrative, and ultimately the field of venture.
Vinit Nijhawan
Vinit Nijhawan is the Managing Director of MassVentures. He is a strategic visionary who has conceived and built several technology organizations that have been acquired by companies such as Boeing, Motorola and Qualcomm.
In 2008, Vinit intentionally pivoted his career from technology entrepreneur and CEO, to helping other entrepreneurs with a special focus on academia. He began teaching Entrepreneurship at Boston University and subsequently led the Office of Technology Development from 2010-2016 (he published a peer reviewed paper on that experience: Maximize Collisions, Minimize Friction). In this role, Vinit participated in several BU committees and organizations, such as the BUildLab, Faculty Innovation Network, Conflict of Interest Committee, Coulter Translational Program, Fraunhofer Grants, CTSI and on the board of the National Academy of Inventors. Additionally, he has represented BU on several boards and business plan/grant review panels.
Vinit shared his thoughts on the work of the Funding Innovation Lab:
Vinit, why is the work of creating more funding access and opportunity important to you?
At MassVentures, we believe diverse teams outperform, and we actively seek out founders with diverse backgrounds to back.
Now that you have participated in helping to design an experiment for the FIL, can you speak to why you chose to get involved with this work and/or what you find exciting about this approach?
While I am an entrepreneur and investor, I am also an educator at Boston University. I feel strongly about educating the next generation about the entrepreneurial mindset and believe that educators should also be innovating and the Funding Innovation Lab is a novel process to do so.
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
August 21: One experiment is fully designed and in motion. The second is partially designed, with some logistics around how it will get executed still to be determined.
Phase 2: Facilitate the Sprints (September)
We are deep in the work of facilitating the two experiments currently! No details to be shared while we are in process, of course.
Phase 3: Open source the Sprint Results (October)
Save the date for our Summit and Results Reveal Party!
October 30th in Cambridge MA 9am-12pm - save the date!
Our approach & strategy
The Funding Innovation Lab is our sandbox for testing and developing new playbooks for venture funding that are inclusive by design. These articles provide a great introduction and reminder of the strategies we are using.
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.
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 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.