Equal Innovation
- Yes
- Connecting small business owners and key stakeholders such as investors, local policymakers, and mentors with the relevant experience to improve coordination, collaboration, and knowledge bases within the small business ecosystem
- Advocating for and shaping policy that supports small business owners and/or place-based efforts in their geographic areas, including increased access to resources, removal of structural barriers, and access to infrastructure such as broadband
Equal Innovation is building a platform to improve the commercialization process for entrepreneurs who historically can't access investors and venture capital, which includes BIPOC founders. Worldwide, there has been an explosion in commercialization, tech transfer, innovation and entrepreneurship centers at universities, academic hospitals, federal labs, local economic development agencies and accelerators. Today, we track emerging startups from across 5000 such programs worldwide through partnerships with these centers.
Our platform publishes rich, in-depth profiles of early stage startups and research breakthroughs to assist philanthropy, impact investors, government agencies and corporations to identify organizations with transformative solutions to global challenges. Our profiles are interviews that answer many of the same questions that investors and accelerators use for their selection process. It takes a human-centered approach to develop a strong snapshot of the team, product and next-stage objectives.
Offline, we are building a consensus conference product that more effectively builds agreement about market direction and customer/stakeholder needs. We bring together a targeted group of early-stage startups that we have profiled with funders, investors, corporations and government leaders to jointly set research agendas, understand market conditions and set expectations for partnership, funding or investment. This helps BIPOC founders to move past the hurdles of pitch competitions or invite-only investor presentations.
We believe the combination of the online platform and offline consensus conferences will significantly increase the number of BIPOC entrepreneurs receiving funding and help funders to identify relevant emerging technologies beyond their geographies.
Over the last 20 years, innovation and entrepreneurship have become an integral part of the economic experience across the entire world. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, young, high-growth businesses were responsible for the majority of net job creation in the United States economy from 1980-2009. Today, innovation commercialization programs and startup accelerators are proliferating across universities, academic hospitals, research labs, corporations and cities worldwide. Governments everywhere, friend and foe, are greatly increasing the amount of research funding available for science commercialization and subsidizing local startups in an effort to take global leadership in emerging tech and create high-quality local jobs.
And yet, nearly 70% of American venture capital remains in just 3 states - California, Massachusetts and New York. Black founders receive less than 2% of the total. In addition, the vaunted accelerator "demo day" is sparsely attended by those organizations funding BIPOC entrepreneurs, such as foundations, impact investors or government program managers, even in these leading states.
We believe the success of companies like CB Insights and Pitchbook proves that companies and investors are looking for better curated information about startups and technologies. By applying a similar lens to mission-driven startups and BIPOC entrepreneurs, we believe that foundations, impact investors and government agencies are looking for the same, but have not yet developed a culture for it.
This challenge aligns very closely with our mission. There are many new startups and entrepreneurs launching in the United States every year that do not get the chance to succeed simply because they are not connected to the resources, partners and mentorship they need to succeed. We believe that technology can provide a vehicle by which to bridge the gaps caused by culture, geography or awareness.
We are most closely aligned to the Challenge's Goal of "Connecting small business owners and key stakeholders. We believe that an online platform, supported by intense consulting and discussion, can help BIPOC funders to be connected to a curated list of mentors, funders and partners that are much more closely aligned to their specific industry and needs than general small business support programs can. We believe this can also drive better public policy once we understand how to use technology to overcome geographic barriers to connect mentors or identify funders that would otherwise have attended local events.
The second area we align with is "Advocating for and shaping policy that supports small business owners ". Our founder, Nish Acharya, served as Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for President Obama, and worked closely with agencies such as the SBA and MBDA to connect BIPOC small businesses to capital and mentorship. We believe that the federal government, through traditional programs new initiatives like the Infrastructure Bill, can be an important partner to support BIPOC entrepreneurs - but need help finding them.
We are looking to serve BIPOC founders in high-growth industries, such as technology, health care, energy and advanced manufacturing. They might be looking for venture capital, or more traditional financing to grow and expand their business. While there is a larger market of BIPOC founded small businesses, we believe that the entrepreneurs in high-growth areas will have an outsized impact on job creation and wealth creation, and would like to focus on them.
Currently, it is estimated that less than 2% of venture capital in the United States goes to BIPOC founders. (This does not include Asian-American founders). And yet, the population of BIPOC STEM graduates in the United States is growing. Even though STEM/technical backgrounds are critical to receiving startup capital, this positive trend has not helped BIPOC founders raise private capital.
Through the online platform, we want to start by sharing information about BIPOC entrepreneurs who have completed accelerators, mentorship programs and otherwise received recognition. We want to use the power of an online platform to better understand the needs of each entrepreneur by sharing information about their product/service, any published research related to the product, and their goals for the next stage of their growth.
Secondly, we want to get very specific for the startup by using smaller, stakeholder meetings that help the BIPOC startup to connect with the relevant sources of capital, expertise, mentorship and partnership. We believe that BIPOC founders maybe able to access a blended pool of capital - from mainstream investors, to those focused on BIPOC entrepreneurs and now, on corporate or government programs designed to support BIPOC small business. But to date, no platform or organization has taken a blended approach.
- No
Currently, we track innovation centers and accelerators across all 50 United States. We have relationships with university centers, regional economic development agencies and small business development centers, federal research labs, academic hospitals and local startup accelerators.
For this project, we will start by expanding to New Jersey. There are several reasons for this. It has proximity to our headquarters in Massachusetts, and it has a very large number of innovation centers and accelerators across the state. It is also sandwiched between two major global cities - Philadelphia and New York. This is important because it provides us with important opportunities to test and improve our model without struggling with some of the deeper inequalities facing other states that can often hamper our goal to find BIPOC founders.
Once we have identified BIPOC entrepreneurs in New Jersey, we can connect them to capital in New York and Philadelphia, leverage the professional talent of the region to find experts and mentors and partner with the state to conduct outreach to corporations. We believe that our scouting efforts, alongside this new platform, can become an important bridge to connect existing efforts to launch BIPOC entrepreneurs with existing efforts to fund them.
Equal Innovation was founded on the principal that transformative change in this world happens through innovation, tremendous leaders and entrepreneurs, and a community of partners. We believe that every idea deserves a chance – to be developed, tested and grown into a product, service, program, company or organization that positively impacts the world. We believe that innovation and entrepreneurs drive impact and sustainability.
Therefore, it is fair to say that our focus is really to help early-stage entrepreneurs, and therefore, closer to "help launch small businesses" than to sustain existing ones. Often times we do connect entrepreneurs who have been around for a while, but are now launching a new product or service.
- Pilot: a product, service, or business model that is in the process of being built and tested with a small number of beneficiaries or working to gain traction.
- Growth: A registered 501(c)(3) with an established product, service, or business model in one or several communities, which is poised for further growth. Organizations should have a proven track record with an annual operating budget.
Last year, we profiled 1000 startup organizations around the United States, including 300 mission-driven startups and social entrepreneurs coming from American accelerator programs, and 700 SBIR grant winners from the National Science Foundation who were developing solutions in public health and climate resilience.
This year, we expect to maintain growth along similar lines because of challenges in securing team members.
In five years, we expect to be able to track 5000 entrepreneurs graduating from global accelerators, as well as a much larger group of 10,000 SBIR winners. Through this, we will be able to better identify founders with specific backgrounds, such as BIPOC founders or women founders.
We are focused on the community of entrepreneurs and improving their chances of success. Within the community of entrepreneurs, our priority is entrepreneurs in high-growth sectors that create jobs, but also those serving to achieve a mission, such as skills development or fighting climate change.
Our stakeholders on the side have been foundations, impact investors and government agencies seeking out such solutions. They may be investment funds looking for BIPOC founders, or the UN seeking to understand how many startups are addressing the SDGs.
We are developing a place-based solution in that we want to support entrepreneurs where they are. Rather than support a winner-take-all mentality expounded by venture capitalists, we believe it is more likely that we will address problems of financial inclusion, climate change and health care by supporting lots of local entrepreneurs, and in the United States, more BIPOC entrepreneurs that integrate local understanding and traditions to achieve behavior change, impact and grow their businesses.
However, capital is global, and is often looking for good ideas. We do not think that capital, partners, mentors or experts that support the entrepreneur need to be based in the same place.
But in order for such partnerships to succeed, Equal Innovation wants to build the more integral, hands on, consensus conference model to help BIPOC entrepreneurs and funders understand each other before embarking on a partnership.
Right now, we have built trust with our partners that are innovation centers and startup accelerators by leveraging personal trust and a shared goal to support their startups. In each situation, these partners have nominated, or recommended the startups and social entrepreneurs that we have profiled.
We would like to continue to use this partnership model, but now to identify a greater number of BIPOC entrepreneurs and help them.
We don't have a strong model for direct communication to BIPOC entrepreneurs and will use this funding to develop one.
- 1 year goal
- Build a platform online that we can populate with our startup profiles.
- Test the hypothesis that we can use a scouting organization to identify BIPOC entrepreneurs and evaluate their unique needs
- Launch consensus conferences and more targeted consulting support to help a select group of BIPOC founders to find resources.
- 5 year goal
- That every social entrepreneur, startup founder or innovator in the United States can leverage the EI platform to find partnerships, raise capital or connect with mentors and experts. We will focus on mission-driven organizations in the areas of climate change, sustainability, education, health and wellness, and those entrepreneurs ignored by traditional VC, such as BIPOC, women, disabled and veterans.
Nish Acharya has nearly 20 years working in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. He served as Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for President Obama, where he helped create programs including the NSF I-Corps, the Commerce I-6 Challenge, and helped write the America JOBS Act that legalized crowdfunding in 2012. Prior to that, he was Executive Director of the Deshpande Foundation, whose funding was pivotal to launching the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, the MassChallenge accelerator and the EforAll entrepreneurship program. He writes for Forbes about is a Senior Fellow with the Clinton Foundation on Inclusive Economic Recovery.
This MIT Solve-Truist Foundation Challenge aligns closely to the goals of Equal Innovation. We were launched in order to address two important gaps in the entrepreneurship space:
- There has been a growth in entrepreneurship everyone, including BIPOC entrepreneurs, but most of the capital remains tied to a few elite cities and elite networks.
- Entrepreneurs focused on impact, in areas like climate change of financial inclusion, are not served by the current model for finding and investing in entrepreneurs, which is the demo day or referral model.
We believe that this opportunity will help us identify funding partners, technical expertise and support to build a new pathway for BIPOC founders to connect with investors, partners and mentors. We are not seeking to shake up the system, but to make it more inclusive.
- Monitoring & Evaluation (e.g. collecting/using data, measuring impact)
- Product / Service Distribution (e.g. expanding client base)
- Technology (e.g. software or hardware, web development/design, data analysis, etc.)
- Foundations or impact investors interested in investing in BIPOC founders or BIPOC communities from an economic development perspective.
- Mainstream investors who have made DEI commitments and are looking for ways to meet them
- Government agencies at the local, state and national level seeking to better serve BIPOC entrepreneurs
- New and emerging efforts to train BIPOC entrepreneurs