In the midst of the 2020 Racial Tensions, one of our responses was to take a look at how we can promote racial equity in the innovation space. Many products and services are not created with racial equity in mind. For example, core services, such as education services, could be improved to be more accessible to under-resourced communities and, in turn, better support racial equity.

We developed a program bridging academia, community, and industry where students will work with corporate partners to help them innovate solutions to making their products/services advance racial equity. This all takes place as a part of a university class where students are learning about innovation methodologies while gaining hands-on experience in developing solutions to real-world challenges.

We established a partnership with a leading university in the Silicon Valley ecosystem - UC Berkeley Haas School of Business - to launch this first cohort as a class offered to their students. The program begins in Fall 2021 and will have several corporate partners for whom the students will innovate for racial equity.