After weeks and months of planning, the Funding Innovation Lab is LIVE! We recently hosted a Community Kickoff event with a small group of early adopters, folks who work in and around venture funding as investors, founders, and ecosystem partners.
We have selected the focus areas for the first two experiments we will run this year! (The actual focus areas are being kept private during the design and execution phase.) We are now in the process of forming teams for each experiment, recruiting team members from within our Funding Innovation Lab Community.
These teams will guide the design of the experiment, what we will measure, and what we hope to learn in the process. Once designed, the LabCentral team will facilitate running these experiments over the next couple of months.
This leads me to my big invitation to YOU.
Please go to your calendar now and save the date for our Funding Innovation Lab Summit and Results Reveal Party on October 30, 2024. We’ll be hosting this Summit in person at LabCentral in Cambridge, MA.
Funding Innovation Lab Summit & Results Reveal Party
October 30, 2024
Cambridge, MA
What is a Results Reveal Party?
I’ve talked before about how we will be open sourcing the results of our experiments. During the Summit this year on October 30th, we will be sharing openly about these two experiments, what we tried, and the results we found. This won’t be a typical poster session! The most important element of sharing our results is to inspire you and the entire community to activate any positive learnings we share within your own organization and work.
For the Funding Innovation Lab to be successful, it’s not enough to generate data that points to potential new best practices. We need to see them in practice by many people to know they both work and are easily accessible. Our Results Reveal Party is an opportunity to share our learnings and brainstorm what it looks like to actually put them into practice.
What is the Summit?
The Summit on October 30th will also be an incredibly valuable day of learning, sharing, and connecting with our growing community of leaders in the funding space, promising startups from across the country, and organizations supporting startups in a variety of ways.
And we’re going to put you to work! We plan to run FIFTEEN experiments in 2025! With that ambitious goal, we need to crowdsource the focus areas for these experiments, looking for key points in the funding process where we might find the most leverage for design changes.
We will be hosting lightning talks with experts, facilitating brainstorming sessions, and creating opportunities to collaborate and build meaningful connections with a diverse and impressive group of practitioners, all of whom care deeply about seeing the venture capital industry become more inclusive for investors and founders.
Who is invited?
You are! If you’re reading this, you clearly are interested in and likely working on creating more funding opportunity and access for diverse founders in the life sciences. Please plan to join us for an invigorating, action-oriented, and meaningful gathering.
Please save the date!
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
Next: We are finalizing the sprint design teams and scheduling the meetings where these teams will determine what/how/when we will run these experiments
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.
Watch the 20 min Community Kickoff presentation
The Funding Innovation Lab is a non-profit program, founded by LabCentral and led by Beth McKeon, with a mission to increase funding equity 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.