Funded by Autism Speaks, “Disability Think” will enable Advocations to apply best practices from their national sourcing model and test out new innovative practices locally by providing technical assistance to companies wanting to build a disability-inclusive workforce.
For far too long we’ve relied on iteration, not innovation. With the unemployment rate higher today than at the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it’s time to think differently about disability. Advocations’ Disability Think project will train participants on how to solve problems and generate new ideas using the proven entrepreneurial process of design thinking. This systematic approach to innovation will close a critical knowledge gap and is flexible enough to be applied to any problem, any business, any size.
- 9 out of 10 startups fail. And 70% of small businesses only have one employee. With statistics like this, how can entrepreneurship impact the employment of people with disabilities in a scalable and sustainable way? It can’t. But what entrepreneurship can do is provide a framework for innovation to empower companies, family members, government programs, service providers, teachers, and people with disabilities to respond to challenges by changing “I can’t do” into “how might we”.
- Advocations will build community capacity by assembling a disability task force made up of entrepreneurs with disabilities, members of the business community, and other stakeholders. This task force will complete a “Disability Think” design sprint to develop scalable solutions to improve employment and entrepreneurship outcomes for people with disabilities
