This week’s dramatic U-turn by Innovate UK can be traced back to a single email sent to FemTech entrepreneur Emma Jarvis.
She’s the founder of Liverpool-based Dearbump, which describes itself as a ‘digital midwife’ that supports parents in their pregnancy journey.
Jarvis had applied to the flagship Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Awards in the hope of securing a £75k grant to help improve maternal health outcomes.
The email from Innovate UK landed in her inbox on Wednesday August 28th and got straight to the point.
“Unfortunately Innovate UK is unable to fund your application on this occasion,” it read. “We recognise this will be disappointing and we thank you for taking the time to apply to this competition.”
Jarvis had spent ‘weeks’ submitting an application and if Innovate UK hoped that was the end of the matter, they were wrong.
Jarvis’s attention was drawn to a paragraph further down in the email which read: “We received 1,452 submitted applications for this competition and 1,271 were sent for assessment. Innovate UK intend to award 25 projects.”
Something didn’t add up. “We were told there would be 50 awards available, so it’s a bit of a gut punch to see that only half of those were actually awarded,” she said.
‘It’s just not good enough’: Female founders call for Innovate UK reform
Two days later she took to LinkedIn to share her experience and inadvertently lit the touch paper that triggered a UK-wide movement.
Within 72 hours it prompted a high profile climbdown by Innovate UK and even saw the matter being discussed in Parliament.
She wrote: “1,452 female founders applied for the Women in Innovation Award. Only 25 received funding. That means 1,427 female founders are probably feeling pretty disheartened right now.
“Women-led businesses are consistently underfunded, despite the fact that they are addressing some of the most pressing challenges in society.”
Jarvis ended her post with a call to action. “If you are a female founder or a supporter of female innovation, I would be grateful for you to make some noise about this issue, by posting, contacting Innovate UK or simply copy and pasting this post,” she wrote.
‘It’s just not good enough’: Female founders call for Innovate UK reform
The post went viral, attracting hundreds of comments and being reposted 125 times.
“I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly,” she told BusinessCloud. “It snowballed.”
One of the people to read her post was Birmingham-based Tara Attfield-Tomes, a non-executive director, chair and speaker who supports female founders to scale.
She took to LinkedIn to write: “We HAVE to change this system because we can’t keep talking about £250bn being left on the table by underfunded female founders and then an institution like Innovate UK publicly adding to the issue.”
Zandra Moore, CEO, Panintelligence
Attfield-Tomes is also the co-chair of the Birmingham board of The Lifted Project, which has taken a data-led approach to increase the flow of capital to regional, high growth female founders.
She tagged in a number of high-profile female founders, including serial entrepreneur Debbie Wosskow and Zandra Moore, who is the CEO and co-founder of Leeds-based Panintelligence.
Moore sat on the UK government’s Taskforce for Women Led High Growth Enterprises and her work resulted in the creation of The Lifted Project, which she also chairs.
Like Jarvis, Moore also lost out on her £75,000 bid from Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Awards, which she’d planned to use to accelerate Panintelligence’s AI product development.
“The feedback from the assessors was very contradictory,” she told BusinessCloud. “However when I saw Emma’s post I thought it was crazy that only 25 female founders had been awarded a grant.
“All the promotion material said they were going to make 50 awards. I thought ‘this is nuts, where’s the money?’.”
Before long a small community had started to form. “Emma was the instigator of the awareness that triggered the movement,” admitted Moore. “She lit the touch paper.”
It was at this point that Jarvis, Moore and Attfield-Tomes became aware of a similar community being spearheaded by Portsmouth-based Becky Lodge, founder of Little Kanga and StartUp Disruptors – an online community for under-represented founders and minorities in the UK.
Moore explained: “I reached out to Becky to bring the communities together because we had the same idea.
“We played to our strengths. I focused on the data and worked with Emma on creating a survey. Becky built the community and Tara focused on the comms. We stuck to our lanes.”
Before long the community had swelled to nearly 400 people, with the vast majority being women but also including some men.
The remainder of the weekend was dominated by a series of behind-the-scenes chats – including with Innovate UK.
“It’s been incredible to be on the calls I have in the last 72 hours,” said Moore. “There’s a whole group of people who previously didn’t know each other but now feel like best mates. We all feel part of a change.”
As the size of the community continued to grow the decision was taken to come up with one consistent message that everyone else would share on Monday.
Moore said: “Without the consistent messaging I don’t think we would have got the result we did.”
As the storm clouds gathered over the weekend, Innovate UK took to LinkedIn to issue a statement: “It’s clear that some of our recent communications on our Women in Innovation programme have created confusion and concern. That’s on us and we own that. Sorry that it’s impacted so many people.”
However, the words did little to pacify the anger of the critics with Becky Lodge describing it as “possibly the worst and weakest PR statement I have ever seen”.
She asked: “Where’s the £2.1m that was meant to fund the other 25 places? How did this happen? How can you not even know what’s going on in your own organisation? Has this ever happened to male applicants?”
At midday on Monday a press release was shared on social media on behalf of ‘Let’s Fund More Women’ and the organisers didn’t mince their words.
“Your time is up, Innovate UK,” it started. “You’ve messed with the wrong women. Innovate UK has broken its promise to female founders for the final time. We can’t and won’t stand for this any more.
“The Women in Innovation Awards promised that 50 female-founded and female-led businesses would receive a £75k grant and package of support, from a funding pot of £4m.
“1,452 women applied for the award; but only 25 awards have been granted. Assuming each grant is £75,000, this is a total of £1,875,000. This leaves £2,125,000 unfunded at present.”
In addition to calling on Innovate UK to fund the remaining 25 awards, ‘Let’s Fund More Women’ had three further demands.
- Engage in talks to address the issues raised and implement necessary reforms;
- Acknowledge the shortcomings in the applications process;
- Launch a revamped award program for 2025, with more funding committed.
The press release was widely shared across social media and the response was almost immediate.
By 4pm Innovate UK confirmed it would be funding all 50 awards and a few hours later Peter Kyle, science, innovation and technology secretary, discussed the issue in the House of Commons.
Tara Attfield-Tomes acknowledged the size of the achievement but insisted the work wasn’t over.
“To mobilise that amount of women in 72 hours, to get the traction we did, and get Innovate UK to reverse their decision, is an incredible feat,” she said. “But this isn’t the end of the journey. We’ve just started.”