One week until our Sprint Showcase!
News from the Funding Innovation Studio: October 23, 2024, Edition 18
We’ve gotten such an influx of new subscribers and followers and people registering for our Launch Party & Sprint Showcase next Wednesday thanks to the press release that went out last week and everyone’s help sharing our launch. Thank you for being here and supporting this new initiative!
Since so many people might be new to the newsletter and joining us in person next week, I want to use this edition of the newsletter to (re)introduce the Funding Innovation Studio, our vision, and strategy.
And I want to send out one final invitation to register and join us next Wednesday! We’ll be sharing the results of our first two experiments and working together as a community to brainstorm the experiments we could run next year. Whether you are a founder, investor, working in academia, industry, or lead programs to help startups, you are welcome at this event. We need all of your voices and contributions!
So what is the Funding Innovation Studio, exactly?
We’re a non-profit initiative, launched as part of LabCentral’s Ignite platform, with a mission to increase funding access, opportunity, and inclusion for women and BIPOC founders in the life sciences.
The Funding Innovation Studio is a sandbox for testing and developing new playbooks for venture funding that are inclusive by design.
We convene and support 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.
Here are some of our core strategies:
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 wicked hard problems.
This summer and fall, we’ve run a test version of this framework of temporary, expert teams designing tiny, fast experiments. It was important, while we ran those experiments, to keep the details quiet - allowing us to observe and collect data without the Hawthorne Effect.
Now, with our Launch Party & Sprint Showcase next week, we’ll be moving into the “open source our results” phase of this round of experiments, freely sharing the details of what we wanted to learn, how we ran the experiment, and the results we found. We hope to see you at the event, but if you can’t make it, we’ll also be publishing the results here and providing many ways to plug into the work next year as well. Thanks for being part of this community!
Register for the Launch Party!
Research Spotlight
I’m excited to launch a new feature in this newsletter. For the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing insights by Siri Chilazi, Senior Researcher at Harvard Kennedy School Women and Public Policy Program. Siri’s work deeply aligns with the approach we are taking at the Funding Innovation Studio. Siri also participated in helping us design one of this year’s sprints and will join us at the Sprint Showcase on October 30th. This post was originally published on LinkedIn and is shared here with permission.
Did you know that simply changing the rating scale for performance evaluations can have a significant impact on gender equity?
This is exactly what sociologists Lauren Rivera and András Tilcsik found in a fascinating study. They discovered that a 10-point rating scale can actually disadvantage women, especially in male-dominated fields.
Here's why 👇
A rating of 10 often implies perfection, and women tend to be held to higher standards, particularly in fields where they're underrepresented. The study showed that men were about 50% more likely to earn a perfect 10 than women. 🤯
But here's the kicker - when the same employer switched to a 6-point rating scale, the gender gap in top ratings almost disappeared. Women and men were equally likely to receive the highest score of 6.
This is a prime example of how small changes in our systems and processes can lead to big improvements in fairness. It's not about changing people's minds – it's about changing the structures that shape our decisions.
What other seemingly minor tweaks have you seen make a big difference in workplace equity?
The Funding Innovation Studio 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 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.
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