A collective focused on female entrepreneurship has called for reform of flagship Innovate UK awards over claims that it underfunded women founders to the tune of more than £2 million.
The government innovation agency’s Women in Innovation Awards this year 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 £4m 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.
This led to outrage across social media channels over the weekend, with founders and the wider business ecosystem calling on Innovate UK for an urgent response. You can find this response further down.
Let’s Fund More Women brought together a collective of hundreds of founders, investors and ecosystem supporters, launching an instant data-backed campaign against the non-departmental public body.
Spearheaded by Becky Lodge (pictured centre), founder of Little Kanga and StartUp Disruptors – an online community for under-represented founders and minorities in the UK – the collective is demanding a comprehensive overhaul of the awards following concerns about the programme’s transparency, equity and effectiveness.
Due to the number of voices speaking up on the issue, Innovate UK quickly decided to issue grants to a further 25 female founders, amounting to the original 50 founders they promised funding for.
“The power of women has been proven yet again. In 72 hours, we’ve made Innovate UK reverse their decision to cut the funding assigned to innovative female founders and leaders,” said Lodge.
“We’re absolutely delighted that all 50 women will now receive their funding, and all £4m will go towards supporting female entrepreneurship. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
“The conversations are still continuing with Innovate UK to reform the process and avoid this in the future, but we’re happy to welcome their public apology and recognition of the impact their ‘wrong decision’ has made.”
Let’s Fund More Women is further urging Innovate UK to engage in a collaborative dialogue by working with the collective to address the issues raised by applicants and implement necessary reforms; acknowledge and rectify the shortcomings by conducting a thorough review of the assessment process and taking steps to prevent similar outcomes in the future; and launch a redesigned award programme by introducing a new Women in Innovation Award in 2025 with a transparent funding allocation and scoring process that restores confidence in Innovate UK.
Speaking before Innovate UK pledged to allocate the remainder of the funding, Lodge had said: “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.”
Lodge 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 (left) and Tara Attfield-Tomes (right), two leading voices in the female investment space.
Moore, CEO and co-founder of Panintelligence, 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.
Attfield-Tomes 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. Moore is managing the collation of the data.
“As a data-driven professional, I knew the importance of capturing these experiences in black and white,” she said.
“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.”
A spokesperson for Innovate UK told BusinessCloud: “Since 2016, our Innovate UK Women in Innovation programme has played a vital role in strengthening the UK’s innovation system. We’ve worked hard to develop this unique programme and we care about its success deeply.
“For this year’s Women in Innovation awards, we said that we’d fund a portfolio of up to 50 projects. Last week, we communicated that 25 applicants had been successful for funding.
“As public funders, we must manage our budgets carefully. The decision to only award this number was a mistake and we prioritised wrongly. We recognise the impact this has had on the many applicants and on the community as a whole, and we apologise wholeheartedly.
“We confirm we will be funding a total of 50 awards. This represents a total investment of £4m for the current cohort, as originally committed.
“As well as confirming 50 awards, we also want to reassure everyone who applied that we remain committed to supporting and increasing opportunities across the system for women innovators. We will be contacting all applicants to highlight how they can access support from Innovate UK and our partners.
“The response to this programme has been our highest to date and demonstrates the increasing number of women-led innovative businesses that are driving growth for our economy. Women in Innovation is one of the programmes that we offer across the Innovate UK system, which includes the Innovate UK Catapult Network, business growth advisors and Innovate UK Business Connect.
“Across this system we offer many products and services to support innovation. Latest data for all Innovate UK competitions, shows that 1 in 3 of successful grant applications were led by women, up from 1 in 7 in 2016. We apologise again for the concern and frustration that we have caused.”
They also pledged to further develop Innovate UK’s strategic engagement with business leaders and advocates in this area and to continue to work collaboratively to improve its processes and “co-create new opportunities”.