Using Lean Launchpad to Build an Innovation Ecosystem at a Historically Black University

The lack of racial diversity in the technology industry has been widely acknowledged, especially since 2014 when many Silicon Valley companies, like Google, Facebook, and Intel, released racial diversity data. Howard University faculty involved in tech entrepreneurship noticed the racial disparity first-hand as entrepreneurs themselves and as participants in entrepreneurship events and conferences. They set out to build an innovation ecosystem at Howard, a historically Black University, in order to address this gap and prepare more traditionally underrepresented engineering professionals for careers in the current and future technology innovation sector. This paper explores the building of an innovation ecosystem at Howard University and addresses how it started, what it entails, outcomes that have been observed thus far, and next steps.