Step-by-step methods to boost innovation diversity for women

It is International Women’s Day, a timely day to talk about how companies are doing in increasing inclusivity in innovation for women.

When Increasing Diversity in Innovation and the US Intellectual Property Association launched the Diversity Pledge in 2020, our hope was to create more inclusivity and transparency in innovation and inventorship by creating and promoting best practices and metrics for companies to utilise and measure their results. Companies signing the pledge agreed to identify one under-represented inventor group, experiment with solutions to boost diversity among them, and collect data on the effort.

What we have learned is that increasing inclusivity in innovation is not only an equal-opportunity social imperative but also a common sense means to improve R&D efficiency and corporate ROI and can also lead to maintaining and increasing national competitiveness. Because we can’t afford to leave any talented people on the sidelines, the goal must be actionable, not performative.

Three years into this movement, what have we learned? Bringing together companies to share their journeys and stories of what has and hasn’t worked has led them to implement best practices, try out a variety of process improvements, and overall create substantial improvements in their gender diversity around inclusivity.

Of the 50 pledgee companies, 30 of them participated in our first round of data reporting, as not all of them had been pledgees long enough to have a full year of data to report. Of the 30 reporting, 17 provided women inventor rates for year one, and six provided the rate for year two. You can see the results in Table 1 below:

For Pledgees that reported Year 1 and 2 numbers, there was a 23% increase to the women inventor rates on average.

Table 1: Women inventor rates

For clarity, pledgees were not required to report their women inventor rate numbers but chose to do so.  So, for the six pledgees that reported two years of data, we can see that focusing on increasing inclusivity in inventorship for women led to an average increase of women on patent applications of 23%.

How are companies achieving these results?

• First, mentoring women on the inventorship process and how they can improve their invention disclosure and patent application success rates has led to consistently positive results. Focusing on inclusivity in inventorship meant that all inventorship increased at companies, not just the targeted group. Male inventorship increased in almost every company as well. 
• Changing language within inventorship communication was also key. Rather than focusing on inventions or inventors, focus on problems solved, regardless of where they originated in the company.
• Find new and different ways to highlight underrepresented inventors, such as LinkedIn campaigns, or internal communications channels.
• Finally, legal groups have found ways to take the burden off inventors in the patent submission process to help incentivise participation. 

Going forward, there is still much progress to be made. 

First, we will focus on collecting and publishing all the best practices that have been created thus far, giving other companies a clear playbook to proceed faster down the learning curve.

Second, we plan to work with both the US Patent and Trademark Office and World Intellectual Property Office to help index the women inventor rate by industry and technology area to provide a more accurate understanding of the challenges facing different companies, industries, and geographies. This is necessary because the gender demographics across technology areas are highly variable, which can produce misleading results about the nature and magnitude of the challenges faced in different contexts. 

Third, we want to help companies get over their fear of reporting and create and utilise an inclusivity metric in human capital reporting initiatives. The meaning and measurement of inclusivity is different from diversity. Reliable metrics are needed to better understand and actualise the latent potential of individuals, companies, and economies.

Finally, we are looking to expand our focus to universities and laboratories, to help increase inclusivity of inventorship in these important institutions as well. 

The scale of these next steps is well beyond what can be done by people in their spare time. Therefore, we are launching the non-profit, Increasing Diversity in Innovation (iDii), to raise funding to employ dedicated professionals to achieve these goals. We see iDii as a collaborative effort working closely with industry and university associations in the IP community to collect, spotlight, and elevate their own efforts and learnings together in one place.

We want to ensure that anyone interested in increasing diversity and inclusivity in innovation can find the answer to his or her question and the support required to produce actionable results.