Innovation Works
Innovation Works is committed to inclusion in our employment practices, investments and partnerships.

For more than a decade, IW has made inclusion and diversity an important operational, portfolio and programmatic goal. We’ve sough out more voices on our team, board, and mentors, and shaped our policies to bring greater diversity to our panels and presentations, and have provided candid training on unconscious bias.

In 2021, we undertook a formal surveying process, giving companies the opportunity to anonymously provide demographics about their founders, owners, and leaders.  Here is what we found:

Survey respondents also self-identified within multiple categories:
                  • 35 % Women
                  • 20% Asian
                  • 13% Black/ African American
                  • 10% LGBTQIA+
                  • 7% Veteran
                  • 5% Hispanic/ Latinx
                  • 5% Person with a disability
                  • 3.4% Other under-represented groups

 

Innovation Works continues to focus on making inclusive innovation work for the region. 60% of the deals and 56% of the dollars from IW over the past 10 years went to companies with women and or people of color as leaders.
Innovation Works is committed to inclusion at all our programs, events, and conferences. IW believes that ethnicity and diversity must be reflected in our speakers, audience, and panel discussions that we host and where staff is asked to participate. To ensure action, we are committing to the following guidelines for all future events. These guidelines pertain to Innovation Works Staff and those who are directly representing Innovation Works at conventions, conferences, and panel discussions.

At IW events, we will:

  • Ensure the best and brightest participate as speakers and panelists in our programs and represent the total community in terms of gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, veteran status, physical ability, religion, age or any of its activities or operations.
  • Not hold any event with an all-male panel during any part of the program agenda.
  • Ensure better gender balance, ethnicity, and diversity for our event steering committees to increase the probability of greater diversity and inclusion among speakers and attendees.
  • Encourage all invited speakers who cannot participate to suggest other potential participants with an eye toward ensuring women and diversity among event speakers.
  • Strive for balance on all Innovation Works event planning committees and consider the inclusion of new members to correct any imbalance.
  • Share these guidelines with our leadership team and all member companies.
  • Publish a link and a summary statement of these guidelines on appropriate Innovation Works event webpages.

When Innovation Works representatives are invited to participate in external events, we will: 

  • Not participate as a panelist or moderator if the event panel is not representative of the wider community.
  • Strongly encourage the program’s organizers to consider their event’s need for inclusivity and share our events’ guidelines with them as a reference tool.

When organizations request Innovation Works to partner or co-sponsor their event, we will require the organization to: 

  • Adhere to the guidelines outlined above. If the organization cannot do so, we would then require written explanation for why they cannot do this, including their plan to meet diversity goals in future years, before Innovation Works will agree to partner or co-sponsor the event.