Going Beyond the Inherent Bias: Fostering Inclusive Innovation
Accelerating innovation, enhancing cross-curricular skills, and preparing students for successful careers as entrepreneurial leaders is a top priority of McGill University. McGill is fortunate to have some of the greatest minds working within its ecosystem, whose contributions over the years include the technology behind digital cameras, the discovery of how the human body protects its genetic code, the theory of electron transfer, groundbreaking work on visual perception, discoveries on how maple syrup extract can help fight antibiotic resistance, and improving drought resistance in crops, just to mention a few. McGill counts twelve Nobel Prize-winners among its faculty and alumni, the most of any Canadian university.
Not too long ago, I received an e-mail about a new minor in Social Entrepreneurship being offered for the first time for students in the Faculty of Arts. It was then that I found myself dedicated to creating change through entrepreneurship. I started attending guest lectures from inspiring entrepreneurs, getting engaged with the McGill Office of Innovation and I took great pride in being part of a community that was moving towards innovation and fostering entrepreneurial leaders. Nonetheless, this community has yet to become more inclusive and accessible. While opportunities for women in science have greatly improved over recent decades, the words of Marie Curie still resonate: “One never notices what has been done, one can only see what remains to be done.”
As a part of my internship with the Office of Innovation, I recently investigated McGill’s portfolio of patents, and it was interesting- but unfortunately not surprising, to find out that only 22% of the 1720 patent applications filed in the last 10 years had a women listed as a lead inventor. Global trends are to a great extent consistent with the previous finding. Four decades ago, 3% of all filed patents listed at least one woman inventor. As of 2010, nearly 19% of patents did. Overall, more than 81% of patents include no women. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research recently published a new report showing that based on how things have changed in the past 15 years, women aren’t expected to reach parity in patenting until 2092.
The same barrier between the genders is very much alive across women in entrepreneurship. The Unreasonable Institute, whose mission is to breakdown barriers for entrepreneurs, conducted an observation across a sample of 1100 ventures that had different gender compositions. They discovered that the founding teams with women raised less equity investment on average than teams comprised of all men. While in general patent-holding teams with at least one woman founder raised less than all-male teams, there is some evidence that intellectual property may narrow the gender gap.
But why is it so important to foster inclusiveness? There is universal agreement that fostering diversity is integral to innovation, and gender equality lies in the heart of this problem. Recent research by the Centre for Talent Innovation (CTI) reported the correlation between higher diversity and better decision-making, and stressed the importance of inclusive leadership in developing winning innovations.
The Office of Innovation is committed to creating a level playing field, in ways that promote collaboration and inclusive opportunities for unleashing innovation at McGill. From conversations that I had with some of the leading women inventors within the McGill ecosystem, it was almost consensually accepted that improving access to funding for women who want to commercialize their inventions and create start-ups, increasing the availability and accessibility to professional advice, improving networks of women inventors amongst each other, as well as access to trained and experienced mentors in their field of expertise, would help foster inclusive innovation on campus. “At the moment there aren’t enough people who can follow up with us and provide encouragement”, explains one of the inventors. “Having people be made more accessible through some type of commercialization resource centre would be highly valuable.”
McGill has an opportunity to become a global leader in inclusivity and diversity in innovation and entrepreneurship. This has motivated the Office of Innovation to create a series of initiatives to work towards that goal. Our first initiative was to identify and celebrate women inventors, our second initiative is an AI Summer Lab for women participants. We’re just getting started, and will announce more initiatives in the coming months.
We hope you will join us in working towards greater inclusion and diversity in innovation at McGill.
