Diversity in Innovation

Paul A. Gompers; Sophie Q.  Wang

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2017

Diversity in Innovation

Abstract

In this paper we document the patterns of labor market participation by women and ethnic minorities in venture capital firms and as founders of venture capital-backed startups. We show that from 1990-2016 women have been less than 10% of the entrepreneurial and venture capital labor pool, Hispanics have been around 2%, and African Americans have been less than 1%. This is despite the fact that all three groups have much higher representation in education programs that lead to careers in these sectors as well as having higher representation in other highly-compensated professions. Asians, on the other hand, have much higher representation in the venture capital and entrepreneurial sector than their overall percentages in the labor force. We explore potential supply side explanations including both education attainment as well as relevant prior job experience. We also explore the correlation between diversity and state-level variations. Finally, we discuss how these patterns are consistent with homophily-based hiring and homophily-induced information flows about career choices. We end the paper by discussing areas for future research.

Keywords: Diversity; Gender; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital;

Language: English

Format: Print

77 pages

Read Now

Citation:

Gompers, Paul A., and Sophie Q. Wang. "Diversity in Innovation." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 17-067, January 2017.

The first module of The Entrepreneurial Manager (TEM) focuses on business model analysis and lean testing. Your business model defines your company and sets its strategic direction, including customer value proposition, operations, scaling, the context in which the company operates, and so on. Designing and evaluating a business model is a complicated task, given all the considerations that must influence your decisions—external opportunities and threats, internal resources, your goals as a founder, as well as your investors’ desires, plus laws or obligation to your community or society at large. While not simple, a well-designed and properly tested business model serves as a strong guiding compass for the company and aligns priorities and critical actions.

This note serves as an overview of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit’s required curriculum course, "The Entrepreneurial Manager (TEM)." General management has been a core educational organizing framework at the Harvard Business School since its inception. Today TEM provides a powerful context in which to learn about general management. TEM seeks to build the knowledge, skills, tools, frameworks, and attitudes required to succeed as a manager. These tools and frameworks are built upon the foundation of other RC courses at HBS, including TOM, LEAD, LCA, FRC, MKTG, STRAT, and FIN. With an aim to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world,” TEM integrates the lessons of your RC year into an overall framework to help general managers at all types of organizations (e.g., small companies, large companies, non-profits, and public servants) become more effective at enhancing the value of those organizations.

Researchers have struggled to establish a causal relationship between diversity and financial performance—especially at large companies, where decision rights and incentives can be murky, and the effects of any given choice can be tough to pin down. So the authors chose a “lab rat” with fewer barriers to understanding—the venture capital industry. VC firms are fairly flat: Every investor is a decision maker, and choices have clear business consequences. Using publicly available information, researchers can see how similar or different decision makers are and compare decision quality on the basis of investments’ performance. After examining tens of thousands of VC investments, Gompers has found that diversity significantly improves financial performance on measures such as profitable investments at the individual portfolio-company level and overall fund returns. And even though associating with similar people can have social benefits for those people, it can lead investors and firms to leave a lot of money on the table. In this article Gompers and Kovvali describe the research and provide recommendations for reaping the business benefits of diversity.

Faculty & Research

Diversity in Innovation

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author