The Culture of the Funding Innovation Lab
News from the Funding Innovation Lab: July 24, 2024, Edition 6
Welcome to LabCentral’s Funding Innovation Lab newsletter! Each Wednesday, we’ll be sharing a quick note from Beth McKeon, as well as timely articles 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.
The Culture of the Funding Innovation Lab
This week, we are hosting our Community Kickoff for the Funding Innovation Lab by bringing together our community of funding practitioners and sharing the focus of the two experiments we’re running this year.
As the culture of this community develops, there are several qualities I want to invoke right from the beginning:
In the arena
The funding industry is a complex system with many players. They all need to have a voice and role in the work of the Funding Innovation Lab. When I talk about this community of practitioners, I envision investors and founders participating, of course. But also ecosystem partners like incubators, accelerators, university programs, industry partners, and service providers who all offer help in the funding process.
Our community is inclusive of all of these roles. It is also exclusive, in that participants must be “in the arena”, doing the work. As I look at who is registered for the Community Kickoff already, these are individuals from each of the roles I listed and are already working within their sphere to create more opportunity for diverse founders. Our community will continue to grow, but we already had such a great start.
Velocity of learning
Speed is our friend in this work. It is an interesting and sometimes challenging constraint to develop experiments that can be completed within eight weeks. Often, that means breaking down a more complex problem into smaller chunks. The value of taking this DARPA-like approach is that we can share out our learnings faster. The Funding Innovation Lab only succeeds if we surface new, impactful learnings that are also adopted and put into practice “in the wild.” This year, we will run two experiments. Next year, we plan to build out the experimentation framework and increase our capacity to run 15 experiments.
Curiosity and courage
The work of any innovation and discovery requires curiosity and courage. In order to truly forge new ideas and approaches to funding equity, we – as a community - need to both be able to talk honestly about the challenges we are trying to tackle (without villainizing any individuals or groups within the system) and be prepared to talk openly about the successes and failures of the experiments we run.
We aren’t going to get everything right on the first try. Humans being irrational and all, we are bound to set up some experiments that don’t go quite like we think they should. When we bring curiosity and optimism to the design of these experiments, we can create a space that allows real innovation and learning to emerge.
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 books we’re reading that provide inspiration for the kinds of experiments we may run in the future.
Atomic Habits, James Clear (Amazon)
There is a tendency amongst those of us who have been thinking about and working on increasing funding access to try to swing for the fences, to launch a big, outwardly impressive and noticeable effort. The Funding Innovation Lab is taking a different approach. Our strategy includes incorporating the aggregation of marginal gains, the idea that consistently finding 1% improvements creates big change over time.
It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.
Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
What is the Funding Innovation Lab?
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.