Invention for All

Lessons on How to Build a More Inclusive Ecosystem

By Carol Dahl, Executive Director, The Lemelson Foundation

Note: All photos were taken before COVID-19 social distancing was put into effect.

We are living in unprecedented times. Challenges are stacking up around us, from new emergencies like COVID-19 to existing issues like climate change. We are already seeing dramatic repercussions for our economy, our lives and our livelihoods.

Americans have faced daunting challenges before, and it’s been our diversity of ideas, backgrounds and experiences that have helped us navigate a path forward. In particular, our supportive environment for invention and entrepreneurship has allowed innovative solutions to not just be imagined, but to also be realized.

As we look at the vexing issues of our present, what role can invention and inventors play now to help create a prosperous and equitable future?

The current pandemic has heightened our awareness of the need for innovation during a crisis. It’s also shown the urgency of cultivating the talent and capacity to prepare for the next one. But the pandemic has revealed that our economy isn’t as resilient as we thought. The innovation segments are still relatively robust, but the rest of the economy is fragile. Surging unemployment rates brought on by the pandemic have exacerbated the gap between those working in the innovation economy and those in lower wage jobs, many of whom have been living precariously near or below the poverty line.

At the same time, racial injustice has become front and center in our minds and in our headlines. We’ve witnessed the blatant disregard for the value of Black lives at the hands of our police. And we’ve also seen economic and health vulnerabilities as the pandemic has particularly affected Black, Latinx and American Indian members of our communities who are dying of COVID-19 at staggeringly high rates when compared to white Americans. They are also disproportionately losing their livelihoods, with 40% of Black businesses closing during the pandemic, about double the rate of general businesses failure.

The pandemic also gives us an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the structure of our economy — not only to make it more resilient, but also to consider and address longstanding racial inequities to make it more just.

As we face record unemployment levels across the population and disruptions not seen since the Great Depression, this pandemic will force us to rebuild our economy. It also gives us an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the structure of our economy — not only to make it more resilient, but also to consider and address longstanding racial inequities to make it more just. Invention and innovation have been core strengths of our economy and can result in greater opportunity for all of our citizens. However, Blacks, Latinx, American Indian populations and women have not had the equivalent chance to participate in the upside of the innovation economy.

We are simply not tapping the full potential of our citizens to drive innovation for the whole country. A report by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his research team at Opportunity Insights investigated the question of who becomes an inventor in America. Their study suggests that if we engaged the full demographics of our country with invention and STEM opportunities, we could experience four times more innovation.

Additional research by Michigan State economists Lisa Cook and Chaleampong Kongcharoen for the National Bureau of Economic Research highlights the missing social, professional and financial networks for Black American and women innovators that can limit success. There is also less support from venture capital for diverse entrepreneurs, with just 1% going to companies led by Black entrepreneurs and 2.7% going to those led by women.

We know from the corporate world that diversity is good for individual companies, leading to greater business success. Data shows that diverse companies are more productive companies. Recent research from McKinsey showed that companies whose executive teams were in the top-quartile for gender and ethnic and cultural diversity outperformed on profitability. And importantly, those companies in the bottom quartile for diversity lagged significantly behind.

But despite this, there is still a dearth of diversity and representation in C-suites and in tech companies. The same McKinsey report noted that in the U.S., only 19% of CEO roles are held by women, and only 26% of Board of Director roles. Yet women are more than 50% of the population. In general, companies have only 12% of their executive team and 15% of their Board composed of individuals from ethnic and cultural minorities, although this demographic makes up 39% of the population. To highlight the disparity even further, 32% of companies have executive teams with no minorities, and 16% of the companies have Boards with no minorities.

Participating in invention and the innovation economy creates greater future potential for individuals. According to the Chetty study, inventors and those engaged in innovation have better incomes and a more profitable career trajectory. And people at companies that are IP dependent make 50% more than other workers in the overall economy. We need to ensure that people of color, women and those from low-income communities are not systematically excluded from sharing in that benefit.

And finally, we know that diverse groups create better solutions to the challenges we all face as society. According to former Columbia Business School Professor Katherine Phillips, “Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not.” In a 2014 essay that appeared in Scientific American, she wrote, “Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving.” Phillips cited decades of studies about how different lived experiences help groups broaden their viewpoints and yield unexpected results.

So what is the current opportunity for change and the role of invention to promote inclusiveness and prosperity?

First, we need to give all children the equal opportunity to see themselves as part of the innovation economy and prepare them to thrive.

Cultivating tomorrow’s inventors and entrepreneurs, as well as the talent required to make their companies successful, requires a rethink of the way we educate our students, going all the way back to K-12. Over the past twenty-five years, we’ve learned with and from our partners about an educational approach that cultivates the mindsets, skillsets and experiences that empower individuals to see themselves as inventors. These skills also map to the talents in demand by CEOs for the innovation workforce of tomorrow according to a Council of Competitiveness study, including critical thinking, problem-solving, complex communications, adaptability and creativity.

This approach, Invention Education, allows students to experience invention and innovation focused on a problem that the student defines. Invention Education builds on traditional STEM knowledge to combine entrepreneurial and design thinking. It prepares students for the jobs of the future by cultivating empathy, risk tolerance, flexibility, self-learning and communication skills, while opening minds and possibilities by giving STEM disciplines relevance to students’ lives. Testimony from both students and educators demonstrates Invention Education’s transformative effect on interest in learning and personal empowerment for students from all backgrounds, but particularly those not traditionally represented in the STEM fields or the innovation workplace.

One example comes from Oregon MESA, which is part of the national STEM equity coalition known as MESA USA. Oregon MESA was founded more than three decades ago to address the lack of access to quality STEM education for students of color in Portland Public Schools. The program empowers students to find and solve problems in their community using an invention mindset. It has been shown to increase high school graduation rates, connect students with mentors in their school and community and help change their career trajectory.

Programs like this create a virtuous cycle, as students become the next generation of teachers, mentors and leaders needed to inspire our children. The Lemelson-MIT program similarly provides design and prototyping challenges through their InvenTeams. Clara Mabour was one alumna whose journey brought her from a childhood in Haiti to a high school in Florida to presenting her invention at the White House Science Fair. Inspired by her own teacher and InvenTeam mentor, she is now a biology teacher at her alma mater, mentoring other students to find solutions to challenges that improve lives.

To start our children on an innovation pathway, we must support the opportunity for every child to engage in experiences like these throughout their education journey, whether K-12 or through higher education.

Second, we must ensure that inventors and entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities, including women, have equal opportunity to capture the value of their ideas by translating them into products and businesses, both for their own personal growth and for the benefit of the country at large.

To achieve this, we need to look at the imbalances that exist in resources and support like access to mentors and venture capital, as well as impediments like high levels of student debt. We must focus on programs that are intentional in providing support for inventors and entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities to take their ideas forward into businesses.

The engineer turned entrepreneur Nitin Rai represents this intentionality. He created the inclusive venture capital fund Elevate Capital in Oregon to reach underserved and underrepresented groups in the Pacific Northwest. It has distributed $10 million to 39 startups since 2016, with 82% going to companies with diverse founders, including 45% with founders of color and 54% to women founders.

Accomplished entrepreneurs like Nitin can serve as role models and mentors to students as they explore invention inside and outside the classroom. Nitin recognized that to truly change the opportunity for people from underrepresented communities, we need to expose students to innovation when they are young. He has helped launch the TiE Young Entrepreneurs Program in schools serving low-income communities to cultivate invention and entrepreneurship skills early on. Only with intentional action will we rebalance opportunity and capture the talent and ideas from the country’s full and rich demographic.

Third, we need to recognize and celebrate the inventors and innovators from diverse backgrounds today.

And we also need to recognize the history that they have overcome. Lisa Cook did groundbreaking research showing that contributions from Black inventors peaked over a century ago, and then were disrupted by racist policies such as the Plessy v Ferguson decision in 1896, and racial violence like the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and destruction of the city’s renowned Black Wall Street.

Patents filed by Black inventors experienced a steep decline due to this type of systemic racism. And yet despite this legacy, many trailblazers persisted- like Jim West. He grew up in the segregated South and went on to become a celebrated inventor with more than 250 patents. He’s known for mentoring college students in his Johns Hopkins lab, as well making high-achieving STEM programs more accessible to underrepresented high school students in Baltimore.

In this time of disruption, we have the opportunity to change our future by addressing the clear challenges of the present. Now is the time to double down on ensuring that we right the wrongs of the past and chart a clear course for all individuals to share in the innovation economy. By opening up invention and entrepreneurship to all, we can create the resilience we need to withstand future shocks. We can also harness the ingenuity that our country is built on to solve the big challenges that threaten our shared prosperity and happiness.