Compass Pilot

Public Policy Lab, Brooklyn NY

Investigators

Abstract

The intention of the Compass Pilot is to explore opportunities that will increase access to and participation in federal seed fund programs by underrepresented groups. Scientific and technical innovation plays a critical role in addressing societal challenges, such as healthcare disparities, environmental issues, and economic inequalities. Yet those most affected by these societal challenges tend to benefit less from U.S. federal seed fund programs. Indeed, a smaller proportion of applicants to these programs come from underrepresented groups than is relative to their share of the U.S. population. Multiple federal funders have invested in outreach efforts, but the lack of innovators from underrepresented groups accessing seed fund and research programs remains a persistent and significant issue. Historical and systemic injustices have led to generational wealth gaps, limited access to higher education, and segregated social networks, preventing some from having the scope and means to pursue funding in science and technology. Structural biases within funding programs’ outreach, application, and review processes may also present significant barriers to access. Applicants from diverse groups may not even be aware of these programs because of limited outreach, and when they do learn of these opportunities, they may not have access to the contextual information and support required to navigate such complex processes. While this is not an exhaustive list of all the barriers for diverse teams attempting to bring their innovations to market, these observations provide the impetus for the proposed work. These issues occur at a systemic level, but targeted and co-designed initiatives — which are the intended outputs of the Compass Pilot - can make significant differences over time. Though other projects are aimed at bringing more under-represented populations into existing programs, this project is focused on co-designing tools and solutions with underrepresented communities. The Compass Pilot brings together the best practices of three private sector innovation approaches human-centered design, lean impact design, and agile development — to seed fund programming. The project team, comprising staff from the Public Policy Lab (PPL) and ConstructEd Studio, will collaborate with innovators from diverse groups and subject-matter experts following PPL’s human-centered design methodology, which includes agile development best practices. At the outset, the project team will engage in qualitative research with innovators and other stakeholders to define existing challenges, brainstorm preliminary ideas, and prioritize potential tools. The team will then co-design tools with a “co-design cohort” of innovators from underrepresented groups. Next, these tools will be piloted by a “pilot cohort” of additional innovators and evaluated, using lean impact methods, to assess efficacy and value. Lastly, pilot learnings will be incorporated into a final set of tools. PPL and ConstructEd’s phased approach, which has been tested across a range of service design projects, will allow the team to follow a systematic process while also being responsive to participants’ feedback. Rather than predicting what the final outputs will be at the outset, the team will work with stakeholders in iterative cycles through which interventions are discovered and refined along the way. This process ensures that final outputs are rooted in the needs and opportunities that arise during research, co-designed with entrepreneurial innovators from historically underrepresented groups. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.