Innovation shapes the products, services, technologies and systems that people use every day. Yet innovation processes do not always take sufficient account of sex, gender and intersecting inequalities. When these dimensions are overlooked, innovations may (re-) produce bias, exclude certain groups of users, or fail to respond to diverse societal needs.
INSPIRE’s innovation-related work addresses this challenge by advancing the concept and practice of Inclusive Gendered Innovation. This work focuses on how gender equality, diversity and intersectionality can be embedded into innovation, research and development, innovation funding, evaluation processes, and innovation ecosystems across the private sector, research organisations and public funding bodies. While research has examined these dimensions in public research funding, INSPIRE's work extends this analysis to include how also actors from the private sector (business-enterprise -sector, BES) can adopt inclusive gendered innovation and how innovation policies can support this.
Research funding organisations play a central role in this. Through call design, applicant support, assessment criteria, monitoring and evaluation, they shape the conditions under which innovation can be developed and sustained.
INSPIRE’s innovation work examined how sex, gender and intersectional analysis can be integrated across the innovation process, from the early definition of a problem to the design, funding, development, evaluation and implementation of new products, services and solutions.
The work focused on how different policies in various geographic contexts support and hinder the implementation of Inclusive Gendered Innovation.
The key questions were:
- How can innovation policies and funding schemes (better) support gender-responsive and inclusive innovation?
- What barriers prevent companies, researchers and innovators from integrating sex, gender and intersectionality into innovation projects?
- What forms of guidance, capacity-building and evaluation criteria help make inclusive gendered innovation more practical and effective?
Innovation is often presented as neutral technical development. In practice, however, innovation reflects choices about which problems matter, whose needs are prioritised, which users are imagined, and which forms of knowledge are valued. This shapes how innovation is designed and which users and market segments are addressed.
INSPIRE developed a strategic assessment of the state of knowledge on gendered innovation based on a scoping review of 122 scientific articles, policy documents and grey literature. The review mapped how gendered innovation is conceptualised across disciplines and policy contexts, with particular attention to how gender and intersectionality are addressed in innovation processes involving the private sector.
A central contribution of the innovation strand was the development of the concept of Inclusive Gendered Innovation. Our results showed that gendered innovation is an emerging and important field, but that approaches remain fragmented. Coverage varies considerably across sectors, geographies and funding schemes, and intersectionality has received limited systematic attention. It highlighted the need to move beyond simply adding “gender” as a theme, towards a more integrated and intersectional understanding of innovation which we call Inclusive Gendered Innovation.
- Find our review here
- KSH4 Working Paper: Research insights
INSPIRE analysed innovation funding programmes that have supported Inclusive Gendered Innovation in different contexts. The analysis was based on four in-depth case studies in diverse geographic and institutional settings in Sweden, Austria, EU Horizon 2020 and Burkina Faso. Across these cases, around 20 funded projects were examined in depth, drawing on 75 interviews.
The case studies examined the experiences of project beneficiaries and research funding organisations (RFOs), including how transdisciplinary consortia implemented Inclusive Gendered Innovation in practice, how funders designed and implemented calls, how applicants responded, what forms of support were useful, and what challenges emerged during implementation.
The comparative analysis showed that effective implementation goes well beyond inserting formal requirements into call texts. RFOs govern Inclusive Gendered Innovation across the funding cycle, including call design, applicant support, assessment, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and post-project dissemination.
- How the policy rationale is communicated to programme managers, applicants and reviewers is important for raising awareness, particularly among stakeholders who are not yet familiar with gender and intersectionality in research and innovation.
- Applicant support, adapted language, good-practice examples and adequately resourced gender/intersectionality/SSH expertise within project teams help make Inclusive Gendered Innovation actionable
- Assessment remains a persistent challenge where clear, call-specific criteria are not available and reviewers lack expertise in gender and intersectionality.
- Dedicated funding schemes can build communities, develop methods and strengthen institutional capacities over successive calls, while mainstreaming into general funding increases reach but can risk dilution if not accompanied by clear standards and support.
- Stronger monitoring of outputs, outcomes and impact would make the results of Inclusive Gendered Innovation policies more visible and support continued learning across RFOs and policy levels.
Our empirical work in BES revealed that in R&I companies, “gender in research and innovation” is often limited to the representation of women in teams or lead positions which labels gender as HR-topic.
Yet this narrow understanding does not capture how gender, diversity and intersectionality shape the definition of research questions, the methods applied, and whose needs are addressed by innovation outcomes. Without clear policy frameworks, capacity building and sound assessment practices, requirements to integrate gender in innovation remain superficial and generate limited impact.
Based on these findings, RFOs should make Inclusive Gendered Innovation an explicit quality and excellence element of innovation funding, clearly distinguishing it from a narrow focus on gender balance in project teams. This requires room for practical and context-sensitive capacity building for all stakeholders along the funding cycle, including RFO staff, applicants, beneficiaries, evaluators and panel members. It also requires robust assessment, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, including dedicated reviewer expertise, clear call-specific IGI criteria, structured feedback loops, outcome-oriented monitoring and coordinated evaluation standards across RFOs and national policies. Follow-up funding and dissemination pathways should be used to demonstrate, scale and mainstream effective IGI practices.
The full case study reports and comparative analyses are available here:
- Innovation Case Study 1: Norm-Critical Innovation
- Innovation Case Study 2: FEMtech Research Projects
- Innovation Case Study 3: Horizon 2020
- Innovation Case Study 4: FONRID Innovation Projects
- Report on an inclusive innovation system for the private sector: Research funder perspective
- Report on an inclusive innovation system for the private sector: Business enterprise perspective
INSPIRE translated these research findings into concrete tools which support the implementation: a Support Package and an Open Training Unit.
Support Package 5: Inclusive Gendered Innovation, a practical resource for researchers, innovators, applicants, funders, evaluators and policymakers.
The package provides guidance for integrating sex, gender and diversity dimensions into research and innovation content, as well as into funding procedures. It turns the evidence from our reviews, case studies and peer exchange into step-by-step guidance that can be used by funding organisations, project applicants and innovation actors.
For RFO staff, evaluators and policymakers, INSPIRE also developed
Open Training Unit 7: Innovation Policy Toolkit, is an online training tool that builds on the Support Package 5 and translates the guidance into short video modules with checklists for each step of the funding cycle, designed for immediate use. It additionally features a module on how to deal with resistances.
Through its Communities of Practice, knowledge exchange events and conferences, INSPIRE created spaces for mutual learning on how inclusive gendered innovation can be supported in practice. These activities brought together researchers, funding organisations, innovation stakeholders and private-sector actors on topics related to advancing gender equality in research and innovation.
The RFO Community of Practice played a crucial role for the innovation strand as it brought together research funding organisations from across Europe and Canada to exchange experiences on designing and implementing funding instruments that support inclusive gendered innovation, and its members contributed to the co-creation of INSPIRE's practical guidance materials.
Together, these activities helped identify practical barriers and enabling conditions for inclusive gendered innovation. These included the need for clearer guidance, stronger gender expertise, better applicant support, evaluator training, cross-sector collaboration and stronger monitoring of project outcomes.
Our CoPs:
CoP outputs: