2022

Responsible Innovation Founders Summit

Responsible Innovation is about more than technology — It is a lens that informs every decision across product, business model, culture, and operations. Hear from leaders who have built structures to bring responsible innovation to every function across their company and how these activities have supported growth and long term value.

Dr. Rachel Gillum of Salesforce and Toyin Ajayi, MD of Cityblock Health and joined Laurie Segall of Dot Dot Dot Media for a rich discussion on how responsible innovation involves all functions of a business. They brought depth and real stories on how responsible innovation has shaped internal decisions from core business design to new feature and product reviews.

Key Takeaways:

• Responsible Innovation supports growth and long-term value. It impacts all aspects of a technology business: who, what, why, how, and what’s measured.

• Need to define values really clearly on day one. Be meticulous about it. Make sure that policies and processes link back to values and purpose; revisit values and purpose every time there’s a strategic level set.

• Normalize that hard problems take a long time to solve - and raise funds within that time horizon.

• In healthcare, the business principle aligns with the ethical imperative to fix it and transform the payment structure, because it is actually more expensive to provide healthcare in a dysfunctional way. “This is not working for anybody.”

• Salesforce has an Ethical and Humane Use of Technology office working on the difficult tradeoffs between accessing certain markets, mitigating harms to underserved groups, and deploying AI responsibly.

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Supplementary Resources:

1. How to build a compelling mission statement

2. An Inside look at Cityblock Health

3. WEF Case Study on Salesforce Office of Ethical + Humane Tech