What is a Funding Innovation Lab Sprint?
News from the Funding Innovation Lab: September 25, 2024, Edition 14
For the past few weeks, I’ve been introducing our 2024 Sprint Designers: Ashlee Halpin, Siri Chilazi, Tracy Warren, Vinit Nijhawan, Natalie Levy, Crystal Brown, and Adam Jenkins. These are the folks who have helped us design this year’s experiments. (Thank you!!)
But what exactly is a Sprint and how do we design one? Today, I want to share a little of the behind-the-scenes of this process.
We use the term “sprint” for our experiments as a reference to the innovation management systems, agile/scrum and design thinking. These systems provide frameworks for moving fast, learning, and running experiments to learn and iterate.
Within the Funding Innovation Lab, we are remixing these elements to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
And at the heart of each sprint is an experiment, not that different from what we learned in seventh grade science class.
The sprint design team starts with a focus area - a point of leverage in the venture funding system where we might be able to design for more inclusivity. This focus area is determined before the team is assembled. In the case of this year’s sprints, we announced the focus areas at our Kickoff event in July (and will only be shared publicly when we release our results on October 30th.)
From there, the team of Sprint Designers are given background info, relevant research, and where possible, some potential design suggestions based on what is known to work in other contexts or industries.
When we gather to design the sprint, there are three key items to discuss:
Assumptions: What are the core assumptions about how the current best practices/frameworks are creating exclusion or less opportunity/access for our diverse founders?
Hypothesis: What is the tiny intervention or design change we can introduce to create more inclusion, access or opportunity?
Action Steps: What actions need to be taken to set up this experiment? Who will complete those actions and what are the due dates?
The design of the sprint is led by the Sprint Design team. My role as facilitator of this process is to convene the group, provide the resources and background materials, and to translate the Sprint Designers’ intentions into a set of action steps that can be achieved within the real world context of the experiment.
We are currently in the middle of the implementation of our second sprint for this year’s batch. We’ve already completed the first sprint!
And if you’re curious about the details of what we designed, what we implemented, and the results we are getting, please join us for our official Launch Party on October 30th. We’ll be meeting in person in our LabCentral space in Cambridge for lunch, a deep dive into our process and results, and some fun collaborative brainstorming about the sprints we should run in the future.
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)
Sprint 1 complete. Data has been gathered and the Sprint team has met to debrief, analyze the results, and propose next steps.
Sprint 2 is in motion. Details to be shared later!
Phase 3: Open source the Sprint Results (October)
Register for our Launch Party! —> register here to join us
October 30th in Cambridge MA 12:30pm-5pm
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.
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