Mothers can change the world. Socially, commercially and economically, mothers are a force for innovation around the world. This report shows how and why mothers make such great innovators.

Key Findings

• As entrepreneurs, activists and consumers, mothers are innovating in the UK and all over the world.
• Mothers are changing healthcare and education systems, care, finance, housing, enterprise, technology and the very ways in which we work and relate to the economy.
• The conditions for mothers to thrive as innovators are growing all the time. Things have never been more promising for mothers of innovation.

Think of an innovator and what springs to mind? Probably a man. Probably someone young, working in a high-tech industry, maybe in a special place, a silicon valley or roundabout. Quite possibly wearing a hoodie. You’re unlikely to be thinking of a mother. In popular imagination, mothers are nurturing, rather than dynamic, and motherhood is routine and dull, rather than focused, creative and cutting-edge.

For Mothers of Innovation, 28 outstanding mother-innovators from around the world were interviewed, on every continent and in a wide variety of fields. The mothers in the report include social innovators working in health, education, food and care, business innovators working in tech and as entrepreneurs and economic innovators seizing the possibilities of technology to change the way we work.

Author
Geraldine Bedell