WIN Relay: An Innovation Leadership Development Program
Just last week, WIN: Women in Innovation launched its inaugural leadership development program, WIN Relay.
A first-of-its-kind experience, this 6-month cohort-based program has been designed by women for women and by innovators for innovators with the intention of supporting senior women working across the industry to advance their careers, lead the future of the innovation industry and help create a more equitable world.
Now that applications are officially open, we sat down with WIN’s Global Leadership Development Lead, Lizzie Azzolino, to learn more about the pilot program, what it sets out to achieve and how you can be a part of it.
What are the career options for senior women in innovation today?
Since innovation is still a relatively new industry, you’d think that career options are limited but actually they are so broad and so vast. Working in innovation today means so many different things... It could mean bringing an innovation lens to a corporate environment, working in a consultancy on a range of challenges from brand, to product to business, or joining or launching a start-up.
The truth is that because career options are so broad and diverse, there’s a real lack of clarity and confidence among women as they get more senior around which of those paths to take and then how to grow into executive leadership roles. And so, in many ways, the paths to these leadership roles across all innovation settings are largely undefined.
What is WIN Relay?
“Our intention for the program is to help women leaders grow in their careers and ultimately lead the future of our industry to advance a more equitable world.”
WIN Relay is a first-of-its-kind experience specifically designed to support senior women working across the innovation industry today. Our intention for the program is to help women leaders grow in their careers and ultimately lead the future of our industry to advance a more equitable world. It has been designed by a diverse group of incredible women innovators to really solve the key problem that we WIN is dedicated to solving -- the lack of women in innovation leadership.
We realize that there are a number of systemic reasons for this, but at the most fundamental level, innovation is still a very young industry, and, unlike other industries, the path to innovation leadership is only just being paved. What is the path to being a Chief Innovation Officer? What does it take to successfully build and lead an innovation consultancy? What is the journey to launch and grow a paradigm-shifting start-up? And beyond this, what are the mindsets, experiences and behaviors that are needed in order to do this successfully?
So ultimately, WIN Relay is a 6-month leadership development experience designed to start answering these questions so that we can chart the path to innovation leadership, together.
Who is WIN Relay for?
The program has been designed for women with 12-15+ years of experience, who are both dedicated to furthering their career in innovation and dedicated to supporting other women in the process. In fact, we actively want to hear about their personal innovation mission in the application process so that we can ensure this is a group truly dedicated to making an impact, as well as the ways in which they’re supporting other women.
Where did the idea come from?
Lizzie Azzolino, Global Leadership Development Lead at Women In Innovation
I have been a part of WIN for a number of years, initially as a part of the team that launched our San Francisco Chapter. As we continued to get more senior, our team started having conversations about the fact that we were doing a lot to support women at the mid-level point in their career but could be doing more to develop programming and experiences for more senior women in our community. There’s a distinction between being an innovation practitioner and a leader. You start to have different types of needs and questions, and you require different types of support. At WIN, it’s our mission is to close the gender gap in innovation leadership, and so this seemed like a real and clear opportunity to do that.
So, I recently moved into a new role, Global Leadership Development Lead, and started building an incredible team to build this program from the ground up together. We’ve been thinking a lot about the best way to have the biggest impact, but realized that the opportunity was to not only design an experience for a group of participating senior women innovators, but also to democratize the learnings to close the gender gap in innovation. We will ultimately publish what we learn about the path to innovation leadership.
What can a participant expect to learn from WIN Relay?
Overall, WIN Relay aims to equip participants now with the clarity and confidence to chart their path to innovation leadership. Within this, there are a couple of core learning objectives. The first and most fundamental is to understand the path to innovation leadership by collectively interviewing and learning from a diverse set of corporate, consulting and start-up innovation executives. Following this, the group will identify skills, behaviors, mindsets and experiences that are specific to innovation leadership, before learning how to engage in innovation leadership experiments to further develop these.
A big part of innovation is risk-taking. As part of this program, we really want to make it fun to test and try new things and share how we’re failing and how we’re succeeding along the way. Finally, everyone will craft an individual, actionable path to innovation leadership by identifying personal gaps and opportunities and receiving feedback and peer coaching support from peers in the cohort.
“Overall, WIN Relay aims to equip participants now with the clarity and confidence to chart their path to innovation leadership.”
What is the format of WIN Relay?
WIN Relay is a 6-month experience running from October 2021 to April 2022. We will meet on average three times a month on Tuesdays at 4pm PST/7pm EST During many of these sessions we’ll have an intimate dialogue with an innovation executive. In these sessions we will learn about their journeys to innovation leadership, the risks that they took, and their advice for us.
For other sessions, we will come together with a few different objectives in mind. These include reflecting on what we’re learning from the leaders, identifying how this might impact our personal steps moving forward in innovation leadership, and creating the thought leadership piece together that maps the path to innovation leadership.
Throughout the experience our participants will work in smaller pods in order to facilitate a more intimate dialogue, as well as with a peer coach.
Where did the name come from?
WIN Relay is about bringing together the strengths and experiences of different women to tackle the idea of the zero-sum game in business. We saw this reflected in the idea of a “relay,” which at its core is an act of sharing. It’s really a collaboration of people who use their individual strengths to advance a group toward a larger goal. WIN Relay, at its heart, is about democratizing the path to innovation leadership, but doing it together.
What is the value of a group experience such as WIN Relay, as opposed to more traditional 1-on-1 coaching?
“The more diverse perspectives that we can learn from, the more we’ll have the ability to develop ideas that have an impact.”
My day job is a leadership coach, so coaching certainly has its place! But, this is something different and complementary. We believe that we are the sum of multiple experiences and different frontiers of innovation. So, the more diverse perspectives that we can learn from, the more we’ll have the ability to develop ideas that have an impact.
We’re making a real, concerted effort to foster intimacy and build trust so that conversation can be really transparent and real. Our bold intention for this program is not only to welcome each participant into this community experience, but for this community to continue far beyond just the 6 months. We hope that 10 years from now, this cohort of women are all still in touch and we can really lift each other up together!
What is the time commitment per week?
Speaking from my own experience, when it comes to professional development programs, what you put in is what you get out.
From the start, it has been our intention to design a program that is rigorous but still fits into any ambitious and full life. The commitment is one hour of active programming a week every week for 24 weeks plus an additional 1-3 hours of personal reflection time dependent on bandwidth.
How much does it cost to be in the program? Are there scholarships?
We all know that programs like this can be thousands and thousands of dollars. However, we’re a non-profit so we don’t believe that costs should be a barrier of entry. The cost of WIN Relay is $750.
For participants who have access to a professional learning budget through their employer, we’re more than happy to support them in applying those funds to this program. We are also giving out a small number of scholarships as ensuring that we have diverse participation is such a priority for us. We want our cohort to be as diverse as possible, and this means diversity across race and ethnicity, across career journeys to date, and across current roles and future intentions.
Can you give us a sneak peek of any of the leaders who may be participating?
Vanessa Colella, Chief Innovation Officer at CitiGroup
Yes, of course! Even though we are women in innovation, it’s important for us to learn from a broad set of leaders with different backgrounds, experiences and mindsets. We’re delighted that the group of executives excited to support this first experience is a mix of the most incredible and inspiring women and men.
Everyone can take a look at our full and evolving lineup on the WIN Relay website; however we’ll have leaders including Neena Paul, who is the Chief Innovation Officer at What If Innovation, now part of Accenture, and Simon Mulcahy, who is the Chief Innovation Officer at Salesforce. We also have Vanessa Colella who is the Chief Innovation Officer at CitiGroup, Victoria Cheng who is a Partner at PruVen Capital and Enshalla Anderson who is the Global Head of Brand at Google, joining us! And we’re also really delighted to welcome Blandine Velin, Global Head of Innovation & Brand Insights at Chanel.
A huge thank you to Lizzie for sharing the inspiration behind and your ambitions for the program with us. We’d also like to extend our thanks to the other members of the WIN Relay team, Laura Hyde-Page, Natalia Kowaleczko, Katie Burwick, Kate Magee, Zoia Kozakov, Gabby Andrade, and Lucia Corry, Ariba Jahan, Maria Potoroczyn, and Alfia Ilicheva without whom none of the above would be possible.
WIN Relay is a truly special experience and we can’t wait to meet the incredible cohort of innovators who will be joining us on this journey.
If that is you, apply here today! Applications are due on August 30th at 12pm PST. Let’s chart the path to innovation leadership -- together.
Interview by: Gabrielle Andrade, Editing by: Lucia Corry
WIN: Women in Innovation Copyright (c) 2021 All rights reserved. This content may not be further reproduced or repurposed without written permission from WIN: Women in Innovation (501(c)3). This blog post is provided for your personal use only.