Who we Are
The Howe Innovation Center is designed to unlock the power of the entrepreneurial and disability communities to create purpose-built solutions for a more accessible world.
Companies in the disability-tech space face challenges: access to customers for primary market research and user testing, finding the best investors, and locating places to deploy and test products out in the wild. Perkins can connect real users to real entrepreneurs and technologists, and together, we can solve real accessibility problems.
Source: McKinsey Market Research
Perkins has identified over 750 companies designing and building products specifically for people with disabilities.
Together, people with disabilities and their allies control $13 trillion worth of disposable income.
That’s 1.85 billion people. Chances are, you are or you know someone with a disability or visual impairment.
The practical challenges that our community must navigate daily are not widely understood. We will shine a spotlight on community-sourced top challenges ripe for innovative solutions.
Innovation for people with disabilities, specifically those who are blind or visually impaired, has lagged the broader frontier of new product and service innovation. Our programs will remove friction points for startups, investors, and large corporates looking to move the needle on accessibility .
The Howe Innovation Center will facilitate partnerships between our key ecosystem players: people with disabilities, startups, investors, research labs, academia, and big companies too. We are focused on helping entrepreneurs ground innovations in true problems while simultaneously removing friction points to get new products and services to market.
Now is the time to meet the demand for disability innovation and accessibility.
Together we can solve the most stubborn accessibility problems, in healthcare, assistive technology, and beyond.
Together we can highlight barriers, and design solutions for true accessibility.
There is a huge and often overlooked total addressable market for disability innovation and accessibility.
We are in the early stages of identifying entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists, accelerators and incubators, universities, and larger companies that are dedicated to creating an accessible and inclusive world for people with disabilities.
Sign up today to be a part of our growing community and have the opportunity to inform future programming. Get early access to our first market research report on innovation for the visually impaired.
Perkins School for the Blind is on a mission to improve the lives of people with visual impairment and other disabilities through education and innovation. We’re part of that mission alongside other initiatives, including Perkins Access, the expert team of digital accessibility consultants.
Perkins Access partners with organizations to provide strategic guidance for improving organization-wide accessibility, which includes ensuring websites, mobile apps, consumer products and other digital experiences, work for everyone, regardless of age, ability or means of access.
Let’s get started.
Help us accelerate accessibility for people with disabilities.