Who we Are
The Howe Innovation Center sits at the intersection of innovation and disability, and 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 DisabilityTech 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 1500 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 1.3 billion people (or, based on more inclusive definitions, up to 1.85 billion). You or someone you know lives with a disability that affects visual, auditory, mobility and/or neurocognitive experiences.
While our school prepares our children for the world, the Howe Innovation Center prepares the world for our children. Support our work by making a gift today.
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.
This is insight you won’t find anywhere else.
Join our community for access to our free, members-only resource center, where you’ll find exclusive research, community connections and intel on the DisabilityTech market.
Our white paper, which draws on analysis from McKinsey Research, defines DisabilityTech – and dives deep into the untapped social and economic potential of the ecosystem.
This accessible data visualization, created in partnership with Olin College of Engineering and Perkins Access, gives a broad overview of the state of the DisabilityTech market.
Who are the major players in improving accessibility for folks who are blind and visually impaired? What tech is already out there? And where might there be opportunity to innovate?
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 – you’ll get exclusive access to “Defining DisabilityTech: The Rise of Inclusive Innovation,” a white paper that draws on analysis from McKinsey Research and dives deep into the untapped social and economic potential of the DisabilityTech ecosystem.
If you want to know more about the Howe Innovation Center, we want to know more about you.
We want to connect – and connect with – innovators, entrepreneurs, investors and problem-solvers just like you.