Member Article

Calls For Urgent Reform To Innovate UK After ‘Women In Innovation’ Funding Failure

Over the past 72 hours, a campaign has mobilised calling for urgent reforms to Innovate UK – the Government’s innovation agency – following its latest ‘Women in Innovation’ Awards, which underfunded female founders to the tune of over £2 million. 

This year’s ‘Women in Innovation’ Awards saw 1,452 applications from female-founded and female-led businesses across the UK, applying for £75,000 to “develop their exciting and innovative ideas.” A total funding pot of £4 million was assigned and set to award 50 founders, but it was revealed last week that only 25 had been awarded the grants, despite some applications receiving over 90% scores. 

With this revelation came outrage across social media channels, with founders and the wider business ecosystem calling on Innovate UK for an urgent response. Let’s Fund More Women brought together a collective of hundreds of founders, investors, and ecosystem supporters over the weekend, launching an instant data-backed campaign against the non-departmental public body.

Spearheaded by Becky Lodge, TechRound’s ‘Woman in Tech to Watch’ and Computer Weekly’s Top 100 UK Tech Leaders, the collective is demanding a comprehensive overhaul of Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Awards following concerns about the program’s transparency, equity, and effectiveness. The group is urging Innovate UK to:

●      Commit to fully utilising the remaining funding: allocating the £2.125 million to award the remaining 25 grants to the top-scoring applicants

●      Engage in a collaborative dialogue: working with the Let’s Fund More Women collective to address the issues raised by applicants and implement necessary reforms.

●      Acknowledge and rectify the shortcomings: conducting a thorough review of the assessment process and taking steps to prevent similar outcomes in the future.

●      Launch a redesigned award program: introducing a new Women in Innovation Award in 2025 with a transparent funding allocation and scoring process that restores confidence in Innovate UK.

Speaking about the campaign, Becky comments: 

“The Women in Innovation Awards have fallen short of their intended goals, and we are calling on Innovate UK to take immediate action to ensure that future awards are more equitable, transparent, and supportive of female founders. Women-led businesses are significantly underfunded in comparison to their male counterparts and we rely on a public body to exercise fairness and equity when it comes to distributing public money.

As part of their acknowledgement of their failings, we would also like Innovate UK’s CEO, Indro Mukerjee, to publicly apologise to the 1,400 women who have spent – on average – 80 hours* completing the onerous application process, only to receive inconsistent feedback from assessors. In some cases, we’ve heard of people scoring over 95% and still not being successful. It’s just not good enough.” 

Becky Lodge is founder of Little Kanga and StartUp Disruptors, the largest online community for under-represented founders and minorities in the U.K. She was also one of the founding signatories that, as part of InvestHER, saw the last Government make a u-turn on their plans to increase the thresholds for Angel Investment. She launched Let’s Fund More Women alongside Zandra Moore and Tara Attfield-Tomes, two leading voices in the female investment space. 

Zandra is CEO and co-founder of Panintelligence and sat on the UK Government’s Taskforce for Women Led High Growth Enterprises. Her work has led to the creation of The Lifted Project, a data and ecosystem led approach to increasing the flow of capital to regional, high growth female founders. Tara is co-chair of The Lifted Project’s Birmingham Board and is founder of PR agency EAST VILLAGE., which works with female-founded, female-led, and female-serving brands and The 51% Club, a community that helps female founders scale. 

The campaign is also supported by Emmie Faust, founder of Female Founders Rise, which has over 7,000 members nationwide, who has been an active promoter of the awards. She is an exited entrepreneur, a micro angel investor in over 30 female-led businesses and a Dragons' Den winner.  Female Founders Rise also runs a directory to find and buy from women-led businesses called Find a Female Founder.

A survey of unsuccessful applicants is underway, revealing significant challenges, including excessive time commitments and a lack of clarity in the assessment process. Managing the collation of data is Zandra Moore, who comments: 

“As a data-driven professional, I knew the importance of capturing these experiences in black and white. But the reality is that there are thousands of women who are deflated and defeated by a process that should have been there to serve them. I am one of them. Having spent significant time on this application process only to receive such vague feedback and from assessors who I know nothing about, is a kick in the teeth. 

“We hear the stats around there being £250 billion left on the table from underfunded women – it’s a huge part of the work we did with the taskforce – and yet we’re letting public money be spent so inefficiently. Reform is needed because there are thousands of female-led innovations simply not making it out alive.” 

Let’s Fund More Women is committed to working with Innovate UK to create a more inclusive and effective funding landscape for women entrepreneurs, and will be issuing its full findings and reforms in a private letter to Indro Mukerjee this week. 

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Claire Bryson .