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.