Female and minority innovators raise fewer resources from investors for novel ideas, even when their ventures are similar or identical to those of all white male teams. This disparity is concerning for investors aiming to identify value-creating opportunities. Evaluating the potential of innovation requires making decisions on innovators and their ideas in conditions of uncertainty where information on past performance is unavailable. Under these conditions, evaluators typically rely on easily-accessible ascriptive characteristics to make decisions – which perpetuates demographic disparities in innovation contexts. Extant research has examined mitigation strategies focused on the resource-seeker – how resource-seekers can pitch their ideas to overcome investor biases. Few have examined the system itself: how investment organizations’ collective evaluation processes shape the diversity of founders that receive venture investment. How do the evaluation processes investment organizations use shape the demographic diversity of innovators funded?
To examine this overarching question, I conducted field research and two field experiments with one global VC fund/accelerator hybrid organization, and its broad, global, co-investor network across different phases. I produced a dataset of over 170 hours of observational data, interviews with 98 investors, and experimental data with close to 3,000 investment decisions on startups in which $320,000 was invested. Leveraging this data, I identified moments in investment organizations’ evaluation processes that inhibited commensuration across startups, and produced demographic disparities in collective investment decisions. I theorize the importance of the role of investor inquiry during evaluation, and test how changes to organizations’ evaluation templates can affect both individual investor’s processes of inquiry and real investment decisions. I identified a causal link between tiny tweaks to investment organizations’ evaluation templates and increased investments in startups with female founders.
Rather than focus on how to prepare startups for evaluation, which can produce short-term outcomes that may be only relevant to a specific set of investors, my research explores a more systemic question: how can organizations change their systems of evaluation? These contributions are relevant not to only entrepreneurship theory and practice, but also to organizational scholars interested in cultivating diversity, equity and inclusion. I unpack the role that organizations play in designing, executing and perpetuating systems that evaluate innovators heterogeneously, based on their demographic characteristics. It is also relevant to any organization considering how to evaluate innovators. / 2025-05-30T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46293 |
| Date | 30 May 2023 |
| Creators | Miller, Amisha |
| Contributors | O'Mahony, Siobhan |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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