Our 10 commitments to women innovators

Posted on: 29/04/2025

Advancing women-led innovation: our pledge for progress

Ensuring that women-led businesses can access the support they need to succeed is an economic necessity and a moral duty. If women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men, it could add up to £250 billion in new value to the UK economy. Ignoring this potential is a lost opportunity for economic growth and innovation.

Since its inception in 2016, the Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awards has invested £11 million in 200 women innovators, built a vibrant network of 10,500+ women business leaders, and helped grow the proportion of successful women-led applications from 1 in 7 to 1 in 3 across all Innovate UK programmes.

Despite this progress, challenges remain. In response to calls for greater support for women innovators, Innovate UK hosted four roundtables in late 2024, convening over 50 key stakeholders, including previous awardees, unsuccessful applicants and partner organisations from across the innovation ecosystem.

Led by Dr. Stella Peace, Exec Director Healthy Living and Agriculture, the roundtables were a forum to gather insights, to explore opportunities to refine our processes and programmes, and to strengthen collaboration with ecosystem partners to accelerate growth. Discussion topics were informed and prioritised with data-driven insights provided by the Let’s Fund More Women group.

In response to key points of feedback from the roundtables, we have developed 10 bold commitments. These commitments are designed to create more opportunities, foster inclusivity, and drive lasting impact for women-led businesses and the UK economy.

We will actively break down barriers for women innovators

As well as running Women in Innovation Awards, we will launch a new community forum and provide targeted support and communications to maximise the engagement of women innovators across all Innovate UK opportunities.


We will transform how we recruit and provide guidance to our assessors

We will set strong and ambitious targets on representation, and will improve assessor skills and expertise matching, embedding inclusive practices into every stage of the process.


We will hold ourselves to account

We are embedding clear inclusion goals into our future strategy, setting specific measures and being more transparent with our data on who applies and who succeeds; working with all partners to maximise the economic impact of women-led innovation.


These commitments will catalyse systemic change, by embedding representation and fairness into every facet of Innovate UK’s work, ultimately building a stronger, more inclusive innovation ecosystem.

Our 10 commitments to women innovators

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Explore the commitments

Learn more about Innovate UK’s 10 commitments to women innovators, which will permeate our entire organisation, putting representation and fairness at the heart of everything we do.

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