What's next for 2025
News from the Funding Innovation Studio: November 27, 2024, Edition 22
We’re in a season of gratitude, so I first want to say thank you - to you as a reader of this newsletter and supporter of the work we’re doing with the Funding Innovation Studio and to all of the people who have participated in our sprints this year, the sprint teams, the folks who participated in our first Sprint Showcase, and all of my team members at LabCentral who have contributed to our successes this year. We are a community and I’m so thankful you are a part of it.
Our first activations
Last week, we published the results from our experiment focused on pitch events. I’m excited to share that two organizations have already activated our recommendation to preload the first question during the Q&A in their pitch events!
Massachusetts Life Sciences Center incorporated it in their MassNextGen competition
University of Baltimore included it in their STRT1UP Roadshow Pitch Across Maryland
These examples of organizations beginning to activate FIS recommendations are powerful artifacts from the future, examples of the future we are co-creating together. They demonstrate that we aren’t just talking about creating a more inclusive industry, we’re actually creating the conditions for this change to happen.
We will continue collecting stories and examples of these activations and will also be sharing learnings - what works and doesn’t work as this recommendation evolves based on different contexts.
You can help our work tremendously by advocating for this recommendation within your organization’s pitch events and events you are connected to as a judge, mentor, or sponsor. And please send us your stories of activating the recommendation - the good and the bad. We still have a lot to learn about how this work “in the wild” and want to share the learnings with our community.
What’s Next for 2025
This is the final edition of the Funding Innovation Studio newsletter for this year. We’ll be using December to plan for next year, so we can hit the ground running in 2025. The goal is to run 10-15 sprints next year!
With that goal in mind, we asked participants at our Sprint Showcase to help us brainstorm focus areas for next year’s sprints. Here are a few ideas that serve as inspiration for our future experiments. Maybe they spark an idea or two for you as well - feel free to send us your suggestions!
Here are just a handful of the ideas generated by our community:
“Have someone else give the pitch, not the actual founder, so ideas & concepts are evaluated based on merit, not track record. Perhaps an emcee introduces the companies and then the founders do Q&A directly.”
“Women’s voices come across differently with microphones, and it can amplify a sense of insecurity. Compare male/female “performance” at pitches when held with or without a microphone.”
“It’s so hard to meet people well, especially at large events or where it seems everyone already knows each other. Host organized, small group discussions as part of networking events.”
“First-time founders don’t have credibility. This impacts women and minorities more profoundly, but is important for equity more broadly. Ask investors to share their career journey in intros and ask them specifically to describe the person who gave them their first chance as a way to bring attention to the challenges first-time founders experience.”
“Many diverse founders are able to get initial funding, but then it drops off considerably. Build more pathways for later-stage rounds of funding.”
Thank you for being a part of the Funding Innovation Studio this year! We’ll jump right back into the work with vigor and enthusiasm in January!
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.