Empowering Female Innovators: Research and Development of a Tailored Support Program for Women in Business

In the early years of Aviatrix, Helen Bailey developed a pilot programme (Discover the Business within You) to help women who had great ideas but lacked the confidence to become entrepreneurs and launch their businesses. Whilst the programme included c.20 women and had a profound impact on the participants’ ability to move forward either by launching a business or taking a different career decision, the programme was never marketed and launched.  Over the last 7 years Helen has continued to develop her skills as a coach and facilitator to help start up and scale up organisations to launch and grow. Women in Innovation part of Innovate UK are currently looking for ideas that they will help and support with their grant funding and mentoring and coaching programme. Aviatrix will be submitting an application to fund the research to understand what the gap is in why so few women innovate and thus develop a bespoke and focused programme to help support them to develop their ideas.   Helen has already consulted with one of the InnovateUK mentors (who has worked with Helen on two of the scale up programmes mentioned above) who has actively encouraged the idea that Aviatrix is proposing. This project is focused on understanding the context of innovation, what is currently available to support innovation and what does the primary research need to discover to tailor make an impactful innovation programme or platform that will facilitate more female innovation in the UK and beyond.  Aviatrix aims to create a program supporting female entrepreneurs in innovation. The challenge lies in defining business innovation and exploring existing support mechanisms. The project's goal is to establish a research methodology that builds a foundational understanding of innovation. This will enable research with 'successful' entrepreneurs, informing the program's design for future innovators. This initiative is part of an Innovate UK grant application which will fund the research and program.

Action Plan Development

Cultural Dynamics is a values-based segmentation model which is based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It has been developed over 40 years and is extraordinarily robust with over one million participants to their annual survey across the globe – their latest update was completed in August 2022. We use the model to increase the added value of any research that we do as it gets to what lies behind behaviour using 10 simple questions that can be added to the survey. The questions allow us to really understand what is important to the different audiences and what they value. As a result, it will be possible to provide an even deeper understanding and context to survey participant answers once they are analysed through the Cultural Dynamics algorithm comprising a bank of several hundred questions.    Aviatrix have been working with Pat Dade of Cultural Dynamics for over twenty years, using his model as part of any strategic research project. Their clients include brands from Coca Cola to BMW, most of the political parties and many leadership and education institutions. We have used Cultural Dynamics in all our strategic research projects including in the last 12 months our work with Paula Rosa Manhattan, P&O Ferries, Mooncup and St Austell Brewery.