Background Information
A survey conducted by Johns Hopkins’ 21st Century Cities Initiative in partnership with UpSurge Baltimore to develop a baseline understanding of the diversity within Baltimore's startup ecosystem with companies' workforce, leadership, board, and cap tables.
Principal Investigator:
Lindsay Thompson, PhD
Professor of Practice
Carey Business School
Johns Hopkins University
lthompson@jhu.edu
(410) 234-9426
Informed consent: By completing this survey or questionnaire, you are consenting to be in this research study. Your participation is voluntary and you can stop at any time.
Why are we conducting this survey?: UpSurge Baltimore is partnering with Johns Hopkins’ 21st Century Cities Initiative to conduct a survey of Baltimore City startups that will establish baseline data on diversity at the leadership, employee, and board levels. The data gathered through this survey will inform the work of UpSurge and its partners, and will be used to measure future progress toward increasing diversity in Baltimore’s startup ecosystem.
Your time commitment: This survey should take no longer than 20 minutes to complete.
Confidentiality: The name of your business will solely be used to track whether or not your business has responded to the survey. Once the survey closes, the name of your business will be removed from your responses and assigned a randomized ID#. Individual level responses will remain confidential and only the Johns Hopkins Principal Investigator and research team will have access to individual response data, but these data will not identify companies by name. Only aggregate level data and summary findings will be shared publicly.
Access to data will be restricted to research team members. The dataset will be encrypted and password protected and stored on JHU's secure cloud server, with file access restricted to members of the research team responsible for data analysis. Individual responses will never be stored on local computers to ensure data security. Only authorized research team members who have undergone Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board (IRB) training regarding the protection of human subjects will have access to the data.