UKBAA Angel Investment Awards: Innovate UK discuss the ‘Investment in Diversity Champion’ award

For this year’s UKBAA Angel Investment Awards, taking place on 8th June, we’ve introduced a new category entitled ‘Investment in Diversity Champion‘. This award recognises a key individual in the UK early-stage investment ecosystem that is taking a leadership role in breaking down barriers for access to equity investment for founders from diverse backgrounds, including women founders, Black and ethnic minority founders, or other overlooked groups.

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is sponsoring the award and we spoke to Emily Nott, Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Programmes, to find out why they decided to sponsor the award and discuss the fantastic work they are doing to improve diversity in the ecosystem.

Having worked with UKBAA for a number of years, Innovate UK has done a lot of work around gender with their Women in Innovation programme, which aims to encourage more women to innovate and help them secure more investment. Gender is only one aspect of what Innovate UK focuses on when it comes to diversity. Emily shares:

“We are looking at diversity and inclusion in its broadest sense. We’re not just looking at gender. We’re interested in what’s happening around ethnicity, around disability, and around underrepresented groups, wherever they are, to understand how are they managing to access investment and what can we do to increase equity.”

Alongside the Women in Innovation Programme, Innovate UK also partners with the Prince’s Trust for their Young Innovators Programme. This looks at young people from diverse backgrounds with great ideas for businesses and provides them with wraparound support, financial and non-financial, to help them turn their ideas into reality.

Sponsoring the ‘Investment in Diversity Champion’ award aligns well with the work that Innovate UK is already doing. With the nominations now in for the category, Emily is keen to discover new names in this area and find out what their contribution to increasing and encouraging diversity has been over the past 12 months. What makes an ‘Investment in Diversity Champion’?

“At Innovate UK, we’re looking at the bigger picture. When you get down to investors, they’re focusing on where their passions are and where their interests lie, and they’re looking at a subsection within that broader diversity. They’ve got to be very passionate to see the issues and the challenges that are real out there. It’s about changing behaviours and culture so they need to really champion and ambassador this so that they are influencing and shaping others.”

Diversity in investing has been a much-discussed topic and there are still plenty of challenges that need tackling. Innovate UK is working on a five-year strategy for business innovation, which includes four outcomes to make a positive difference around equality, diversity and inclusion. The first outcome is focused on making the innovation system more inclusive by opening access and addressing barriers to increase diversity within the system as a whole.

The second outcome is to drive a more inclusive culture within businesses in the UK. Going into more details, Emily explains:

“It’s about changing behaviours and culture so they need to really champion and ambassador this so that they are influencing and shaping others.”

“We need to demonstrate to businesses that it’s really important to factor equality, diversity and inclusion into their growth plans and into their future strategies. Investors are interested in this because it’s going to make them better places to work and increase their ability to attract and retain the best talent, and ultimately they’ll be more productive and globally competitive as a result of that.”

The third outcome is to ensure that innovators and businesses are thinking about equality, diversity and inclusion at the earliest point, and understanding what that means for their product or service. The final outcome is improving the data around equality, diversity and inclusion so that we can understand what access to funding and investment look like across the innovation system. This final outcome is one of the biggest challenges as Emily highlights:

“When we know what the barriers that need to be addressed are, and we take action to address them, how over time are we going to monitor that we’ve made a positive difference? We need to understand if we’re seeing an improvement in the overall diversity and making the system more inclusive. We can’t do this without the data, so there’s a real big push to get more consistency in what data is collected in terms of people and companies that are getting investment through an EDI lens, and more sharing of that data across different partners and funders and investors so that we can see system wide what’s happening.”

Part of Innovate UK’s work is to look internally as well as externally. They believe in empowering and upskilling their staff so that they can fully understand what equality, diversity and inclusion means, and why it’s relevant to the role they have. Research has shown that building diverse terms has many benefits and Emily believes that Innovate UK can play more of a significant role in compiling case studies and learnings, to show the real commercial business benefits from adopting a more inclusive approach.

“There’s a cognitive diversity. It’s about creative thinking, bringing together people with different lived experiences, different perceptions, and really importantly, it’s about ensuring that companies who are developing products and services that are for society, understand what society wants and what the impacts on society as a whole are going to be.”

Looking to the second half of 2021, Innovate UK has a busy few months ahead. They will be launching new competitions for funding for both their Women in Innovation and Young Innovators Programmes. They will be publishing their five-year business innovation strategy, which will result in new activities being launched. Emily is also keen to engage with the nominees for the ‘Investment in Diversity Champion’ award to see how they could potentially partner.

“We are at a point where we’ve made good progress in some areas, but we know that there are still lots of things that need to be worked on. None of it is about us doing things on our own in isolation, it requires working with partners across the system, including investors, and thinking about how collectively we can combine forces and make a positive difference. We’ll be looking for those sorts of opportunities.”

Find out more about Innovate UK at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/innovate-uk 

The UKBAA Angel Investment Awards takes place on 8th June 2021. Find out more about the awards and book your ticket at https://awards.ukbaa.org.uk.