Funding Innovation Studio
The Funding Innovation Studio, powered by LabCentral IgniteVC, convenes professionals across the VC industry to identify, test, and adopt research-backed behavioral design shifts that create a more inclusive VC culture for diverse founders.
Program Overview
The Funding Innovation Studio is a non-profit program founded by LabCentral IgniteVC and led by Beth McKeon, with a mission to increase funding access, opportunity, and inclusion for women and BIPOC founders in the life sciences.
It 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.
How It Works
- 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 a wicked hard problem.
Eligibility and Criteria
The Funding Innovation Studio is an open-source community of practitioners across the venture capital funding industry, including investors, founders, academics, and entrepreneurial support organizations.
We welcome anyone interested in our work to join the community! The best way to get involved is by subscribing to our Substack newsletter. You'll receive updates, insights from experiments, and opportunities to contribute to our efforts.
Events
SHOWCASE | 7/25/24
KICKOFF | 10/30/24
