What is your image of an inventor or innovator? A man alone in a lab? Increasing evidence shows most innovation comes from two or more people… one of whom might even be a woman! We stereotype innovators as men and mainly in STEM* products. A quick quiz – who invented the following: the circular saw, COBOL and the compiler, the windshield wiper, Kevlar and a radial keyboard for the paralyzed? [Answers at the end of the post]

Three years ago, Whitney Johnson asked me how I felt as the only female partner in my VC firm. I’d never thought about it before. I never felt any discrimination or lack of respect from my partners. From how I was raised through my education and my career at Bell Labs and AT&T, I never felt any gender bias. Maybe it was there and I was just insensitive.  I investigated – looked, listened and learned…and realized it was still an issue in the 21^st century! In June 2013, Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya invited women to crowd-create a book on women innovators by sharing their own stories. I submitted one (Chpt 3, Disrupting My Way Through Life). Fast-forward ~ Innovating Women launches today!

Vivek and Farai have curated a collection of personal, powerful, inspiring, encouraging, disruptive, and challenging stories of women who grabbed the status quo by the horns. The stories are from and about women from all over the world, in STEM, investing, non-profits and STEAM. The stories, including one by America’s new CTO and former VP at Google[X] Megan Smith, are the authentic voices of women who have persevered, overcome, created, and innovated their careers and accomplishments. This book is full with lessons for women, men, girls, boys, teachers, leaders, managers, even politicians on how to overcome stereotypes, stigmas, and artificial distinctions.

These lessons are being applied today and barriers are breaking down. Freshman Engineers designing radial keyboard for the communication impaired (e.g., ALS)I am privileged to see changes first-hand.  Last April, I helped at the Assistive Tech Makeathon for students to create communication solutions for people who can’t communicate (like ALS). The rapid design-prototyping-iterating process resulted in several potential hardware and software products.

Three freshman women engineers won the software award for an easy, attractive and quick radial keyboard! Get Innovating Women. Read it, share it, discover, encourage and empower women and girls to create more stories so we can unleash the talent needed to solve the wicked problems facing our world.  Keep the stories coming! *STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math; STEAM = STEM + [Art + Design] Inventors:

• The circular saw: Tabitha Babbitt in 1813
• COBOL and the compiler: Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (yes, Admiral!) in early 1950s
• The windshield wiper: Mary Anderson in 1903
• Kevlar: Stephanie Kwolek in 1964
• Radial Keyboard: Margaret Mathieu, Katie Hsai, Kassie Wang in 2014, Brown ‘17

Besides a lot of creative energy, young people bring valuable skills to the table – particularly digital and social networking capabilities. This can be great boon to any growing enterprise. But only a small proportion of high school students around the world have access to entrepreneurship education, let alone education in social entrepreneurship. When young people finish school, they should be more aware of entrepreneurship as a career opportunity and they should know what steps to take if they want to start a business.

Private-public partnerships that provide for interaction between schools and the business community may be instrumental in closing the gap between a traditional academic curriculum and the skillset necessary to launch a successful start-up. Social Innovation Relay (SIR), a global initiative run by international educational organization Junior Achievement, challenges high school students to develop innovative business concepts that address social needs. Student teams from all over the world are paired with corporate volunteers from Hewlett Packard who act as mentors and help teams turn their concepts into viable business projects.

A jury selects the three best concepts – those that stand a real chance of becoming profitable ventures in their respective communities. In 2014 a group of four secondary school students from Kenya developed the winning concept, an affordable mosquito trap to reduce the incidence of malaria in the country. Such mentorship programs have a proven positive impact on participants and their motivation to start real social enterprises in the future.

According to Warwick University’s Centre for Education and Industry, which evaluated the impact of the Social Innovation Relay in 2013, 78 percent of participating students are now more confident of their ability to start a social enterprise, 86 percent are more aware of what social issues exist in their own community and 84 percent are more aware that social and business objectives can be complementary. At least ninety percent improved their communication, motivation, critical thinking and teamwork skills.

Drawing on the four-year experience of running the Social Innovation Relay, we have identified the most important factors that maximize the impact of this kind of initiative:

• Draw young people’s attention to real problems in their communities, because these are things they know and care about. This motivates them to learn and apply their skills.
• Ensure access to corporate mentors from large companies who are knowledgeable about business, management and marketing techniques necessary to get a social enterprise off the ground.
• Maximize the wow factor for young people by using IT in interesting ways.
• Most of young people participating in the program are social media and IT savvy, but they need more coaching to help them apply those social media skills to their business projects.

It is not enough just to help young people identify unmet needs in their communities and develop business plans. Access to funding is a crucial issue for all entrepreneurs, and an even greater issue for social entrepreneurs from developing countries. To address this problem, Junior Achievement partnered with the Singapore-based Pwee Foundation, which connects private investors and social entrepreneurs.

The Foundation is evaluating the best business ideas put forward by this year’s students to determine whether they will be able to attract investors and receive necessary funding. In the meantime, the shortlisted social innovation teams continue receiving mentorship and business coaching from the Pwee Foundation during the evaluation stage.

The working model of the SIR can be duplicated. The biggest challenges are scaling up the initiative and attracting more corporate volunteers to maximize its reach. These challenges can best be addressed by raising awareness of the positive impact of such programs on young people’s entrepreneurial potential, and their relatively low implementation costs. Programs such as SIR do not require educational system reforms or additional government spending.

Yet they are proven tools to spur social innovation among youth and equip them with a skillset that can help them make a difference in their communities.

Caroline Jenner is CEO of Junior Achievement – Young Enterprise Europe

Something terrible is happening to women who work. I deal with it constantly because I coach men and women executives who work in large corporations. It gives me a front row seat that allows me to closely look at what really works for women to rise in leadership and influence and still like their lives. 

I can tell you one thing, the worst advice women get is to act like a man. 

And that’s exactly the advice they’re getting. “Lean In” Author Sheryl Sandberg has recruited Condoleezza Rice, Anna Maria Chavez (the CEO of Girl Scouts, pictured above, right) to encourage girls everywhere to be more assertive. You know, speak up! Push your point of view! And, “Man-up!” They have started a campaign called “ban bossy” to tell girls the lie that the reason society is cheating women out of their fair share of leadership opportunities and money is because they’re not aggressive enough.

Using anecdotes out of their own life stories they claim that assertive behavior in boys marks them as leaders while the same behavior labels a girl as being to bossy. So their solution is to make bossy the N-word for younger generations. Then girls could be assertive and become the leaders they desire to be. This is simply colossally crazy.

When I am called on to help an executive in trouble it is most often because they are too assertive.

Leaders whose primary quality is their assertiveness are known as jerks or worse. Nobody likes a bossy know-it-all whether you’re a man or a woman. In fact in today’s flat organization the most important asset a leader can have is the social intelligence to build collaborative work-teams to implement a stream of innovations. Leaders who try to do this by telling people what to do and using their power to take charge end up killing creativity, innovation and commitment necessary to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive world.

No, raising girls to be bossy women is not the answer to the lack of leadership opportunity that women have.

Yet it’s not surprising that smart people continue to make this error about the root cause of women getting a raw deal at work. A review of human history leads to a truly awful conclusion… Women have always been exploited by men. I don’t mean that all men are bad, abusive or even unkind. I’m just stating the obvious.

Human institutions, laws and culture have virtually always over-favored men at the expense of women.

A little history… Less than 100 years ago women did not have the right to vote! In most countries they didn’t have the right to own property or a legal right to raise their own children. Sexual assault was not considered a real crime. (It still isn’t in many countries.) Until 50 years ago there were few women professionals. Doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants and women were universally discouraged from pursuing careers.

The cultural effect was that women were almost solely dependent on men for their economic security which made them put up with a lot of stuff that they should have never put up with. In the 1960s we couldn’t pass an equal rights amendment so we got feminism. Now I don’t want to antagonize any feminists I just want you to consider how men have twisted feminism to make the world better for them rather than women.

While it’s true women got to enter the workplace, for the most part it wasn’t for good jobs. Today two-thirds of people who are in the minimum wage are women. And women still only make 75% of what men make for doing the same work. In management it’s even worse… women earn only 68% of what the same male managers do. (Source: Catalyst.org) And in 2013 we could not even get Congress to pass an equal pay law… I know, it’s insane!

So what’s the world men have created by manipulating the ideals of feminism?

Survey show that women are suffering the health effects of record-high sustained stress because they are the primary child raisers, house cleaners and family managers even when they have full-time jobs. And this is in families where a husband is present. We also have a record number of single mothers who teeter on the edge of economic disaster because of rampant job insecurity while they try to raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted children.

And by the way, most men are just fine with this. Men have worked hard to create their unique twist on equality. For instance, single men rarely go out on dates, instead they just have meet-ups which enables them to meet potential sexual partners with the least amount of effort and commitment. They typically also require women to pay their own way and frequently find ways to wheedle women into paying for everything.

Research reveals that the male creative executives who control our diet of entertainment via movies, TV and music have created social norms that make women who do not make themselves sexually available at the very beginning of a potential relationship seem prudish or hung up.

But most of all, men love it when they can get women to do their work.

In most of the large organizations I consult with women make up the majority of the management ranks but not at the level of senior leadership.  Just like at home, male business leaders rely on women to make everything work but give them very little real power. And even the women CEOs I’ve consulted with are dominated by their male boards and testosterone-crazed Wall Street analysts who soon turn them into women who have to behave like men to succeed.

I know these results aren’t what feminists had in mind but it just seems to me that many of the real gains that women have fought for in political, economic and social equality have been distorted by male-dominated institutions that are awesome at doing one thing… furthering men’s self-interest.

And now we have the perfect spokesperson for male domination. Her name is Sheryl Sandberg. You probably know her as the billionaire COO of Facebook and the author of her horrifically, stupid best-selling book, Lean In. Her book and message has been summed up by many as… if you want to get ahead in the world act like a man, lead like a man… just quit making excuses, acting like a victim or being shy about what you want. Take your place at the big table, be prepared, be confident, and above all be assertive. A few other things. Work hard.

If your work requires travel, grit your teeth and go. Be sure to marry well and insist your husband does an equal share of the household work and child-raising. Get home by six every night, have family dinner, then get on your conference calls and kick some ass. If that sounds like good advice to you perhaps you, like Sheryl are a billionaire executive who graduated from Yale, have friends in the White House and have several nannies to cover for you.

And just look at what Sheryl Sandberg does. She makes sure that Facebook makes money so that CEO Mark Zuckerberg gets richer and can spend his days playing around with big ideas.

Let me point something out to you.

Creating a new generation of highly driven selfless women dedicated to making our businesses and institutions work is a man’s dream. Most powerful men would rather sit on Boards of Directors so we don’t have to do the real work. I just don’t see men giving up their power to women simply because they’re capable executives. The man’s need to be in charge is virtually limitless. On the other hand getting women to do their work… now that is very attractive. If you think I’m kidding consider General Motors.

They shocked the world by choosing Mary Barra to be the first female CEO to lead a car company. Awesome right? Well, you tell me. Her total compensation is less than 50% of the compensation of the man she replaced. He, by the way, will continue to serve GM as an “outside advisor” still making more pay than she does! It’s just another example of men getting women to do their work without paying them. Do women really want to be leaders so badly they will accept any terms pushed on them by men?

Well enough about the problem… how ‘bout a solution?

After doing a lot of thinking I believe the only real answer is to start a parallel economy. One driven by women-led enterprises. These companies need to operate on the useful disciplines of the old economy but incorporate the uniquely vital abilities of women to trounce their gray-beard competition. Please understand by women-led I don’t mean women only enterprises. It’s already proven that the most successful organizations integrate the strengths of both men and women in ways that reduce their individual weaknesses. But for this to become common place we need a lot more women entrepreneurs and CEOs.

The reason this is so important is that I believe that only radical change can create a future of sustainable abundance. All attempts to reform the old economy have failed.

But women can use the rules of the Old Boys Club to bring it down. They can out-compete them, out-innovate them and they can create work-lives that embody happiness as well as success. And they can turn capitalism into the engine for civilization.

I will tell you HOW you can do something to ignite this change right now in part 2 of this blog coming next week. I hope you’re curious.

Also don’t be shy about commenting on my unconventional views… am I out to lunch about how men exploit women? Is the ‘system’ rigged against them? Is Sheryl Sandberg right… women would be better off behaving like men? Thoughts?

 

A serious businesswoman lurks beneath the former supermodel, who has launched a venture capital firm and wants to teach girls how to fiercely pursue their ambitions.

If you thought all models were only into their looks and had selfish, unlikeable personalities, think again. Television personality, actress and supermodel Tyra Banks has adopted a no nonsense approach to promote and empower women in business. Under the slogan “Fierce, Fearless, Flawsome,” Banks established the TZone in 1999, a leadership development program for girls, and more recently, venture capital company Fierce Capital LLC, that has a preference for funding start-ups that are predominantly female-led or focused.

The word “flawsome,” coined by Banks, is a combination of  you + your flaws + awesome = flawsome.” She explained the concept was tied to her years on America’s Next Top Model where she and producer Ken Mok cast over 70 percent of participants. Debate raged about what constituted beauty and Banks came up with the word as a way of expanding the concept of what beauty means. “Perfect is boring,” says Banks. “Flaws are awesome.”

Banks is a vocal critic of fashion magazines that show models who appear to have eating disorders. She saw models backstage, during her modeling days, who abused their bodies to maintain a certain weight and feed into commonly held ideals of what perfection and beauty was. In her early 20’s Banks was given a list of designers who no longer wanted to book her for shows because of her growing curves. Realizing she would need to deprive herself of nutrition to continue working, she broke down in tears.

Her mother’s solution saved the day, “’Eat pizza,’ she told me. We went to a tiny pizzeria in Milan together and strategized how to turn my curves into a curveball,” Banks recalls. “In a way, it was my decision not to starve myself that turned me into a supermodel, and later on, a businesswomen.”

She warns girls not to fall prey to thinspirational images of beauty and mothers to be careful about how they talk about their bodies in front of their daughters. With her parents divorced at the age of six, and having had her fair share of abusive relationships, Banks has first-hand experience of the self-esteem building that many young girls need. “The pre-teen and teen years are the most complex developmental years in a contemporary girl’s life,” says Bank’s.

“It’s terrifying, turbulent, and terrific… all at once. A girl’s body, family, friends, schools and community are all demanding growth and change.” For many inner-city girls living in poverty, low self-esteem, disengagement from school, pervasive community violence, risky behaviors and sexual experimentation contribute to a trip down a slippery personal slope. “As a young girl growing up, people are going to tell you, ‘no, you can’t,’ all the time.

You have to have tunnel vision and know that you want it, that you’re going to do it, through sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. Saying, ‘ooh I want that’ – magic wand – is not going to happen.”

The Tzone, situated in the Lower Eastside of New York, inspires the hundreds of girls who attend to believe in themselves and to take control of their futures. The girls-only club encourages the awareness of the accomplishments of outstanding women, as a way of showing what’s possible.

Banks also wanted the Tzone to become an actual space that girls could come to instead of just another grant-making foundation that gives out money. The $20 million project is funded through fundraising initiatives, the City of New York and a yearly Flawsome Ball, which sees celebrities and sponsors raise nearly $1 million per event. Some of the activities at the Tzone include community activism, dance, filmmaking, leadership, sports, writing or financial literacy initiatives that will help create young entrepreneurs.

Originally started as a series of summer camp, Tzone’s is designed to reinforce positive values and encourage girls to resist social pressures through a fierce, self-esteem building adventure. Banks uses the word “fierce” a lot in her branding, although she balances it frequently with another of her crazy words, “smize” – smiling with your eyes. Her journey from supermodel to super-mogul has been a personal one, in which she has identified closely with her target market, rather than seeing them as another charitable tax break.

“I launched this venture with my own money,” says Banks. “ I feel I have a responsibility to lead by example and bring attention to the issues facing young women. I want them to take positive action to realize their ambitions.” Banks enrolled in a three-year Owner/President Management Program (OPM) at Harvard, graduating in 2012, and has been prolific in establishing new business ventures ever since, all with a slant towards empowering women.

Despite the shallowness found within much of the fashion and beauty industry, Banks is showing that it can evolve beyond this. She’s acutely aware of her celebrity status and knows she cannot allow it to become an overriding factor in her work at Tzone. “What I don’t want to be is Tyra, the ‘celebrity girl,’ coming here and the girls being excited when they see me,” says Banks. “I want them to be numb to me.

I can do normal work here and they can see me, to know that this is what a business is. It’s not about living on a red carpet. I am a businesswoman who goes to work every single day.”
 To fund her social ventures Banks established Fierce Capital, the investment arm of The Tyra Banks Company, of which she is both CEO and Chairman. Its aim is to help raise capital and develop profitable business strategies.

One of her early investments was in The Hunt, a community-driven online shopping experience, that will track down coveted items seen in social media photos and let you know where to buy them. The fun and innovative approach to shopping allows women to help other women find their perfect outfit.

Since its launch The Hunt has surged to one million unique monthly visitors, attracting hundreds of thousands of people who are drawn to this new approach to collective retail and styling. Through Fierce Capital, Banks is leveraging her unique background of 20 years as a leader in fashion, beauty and entertainment. And rather than moving away from her previous career as a model, she is using all she learnt to develop innovative products and businesses, for the ultimate benefit of women’s empowerment.

Fierce Capitals latest investment in Android application Locket, in November this year, had the CEO and Co-founder, Yunha Kim, reinforced this when she said, “As a female founder, I am excited to be able to lean on another female entrepreneur for advice and deep media expertise.”

Banks supports businesses through brand alignment and by giving financial support that entrepreneurs might otherwise find difficult to procure through traditional venture capital channels.

The successful businesses that she takes on will have the opportunity to leverage Bank’s social and traditional media sphere of influence, as well as tap into The Tyra Banks Company’s extensive network to build significant business relationships.

Banks does not see her business units in isolation, but rather as complimentary structures that might even give rise to new business ideas. In an age jaded with countless combinations of private investment meeting fashion, it’s impressive, and extremely rare to see a fashion model, leading a capital group with Harvard certificate in hand. While Banks is desperate for the young girls in her care to find women to look up to in society, she has inadvertently become their greatest role model.

“I’m encouraging girls to be leaders, not followers; in control, not out of control; powerful, not powerless,” she says.