I-Corps Node: NSF Bay Area Regional I-Node Program

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Project Description: This project involves the creation of a Regional I-Corps Node in the northern California Bay Area (Bay Area Node) through a partnership of the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Stanford University. It is producing an extensive entrepreneurship platform that is built on the scientific, technology, and engineering strengths, business thought leadership, and external ecosystems of the three universities. The Node is applying and disseminating the Lean LaunchPad methodology through classes, focused training, and mentoring services to help drive the creation of science and technology-based startups. The partners are investigating how I-Corps Node training influences research commercialization outcomes and exploring ways to better understand the early stages of team formation and evolution, formation and evolution of advising networks, timing and content of decisions, and real-time attention allocation. The Node is also studying the formation of entrepreneurial teams and ways to measure team evolution and effectiveness, in order to better understand how they can be supported in their efforts to commercialize invention. Teams are being monitored (post-training) to observe their outcomes and determine whether they are optimizing activities for success. The LaunchPad Central website and online mentoring platform is enabling the team to aggregate/analyze the data and examine what makes technology commercialization efforts succeed or fail. Broader Significance: The Node is producing both regional and national impact by raising awareness of the value of entrepreneurship among science and engineering faculty and students and enhancing the online availability of Lean LaunchPad principles. By providing much of the education, team tracking, and mentoring online, the Bay Area Node is creating a scalable startup ecosystem that allows content and business processes to be readily updated. It offers a highly instrumented ecosystem that is tracking progress and measuring program effectiveness; thus creating a continuously improving program that is positively impacting the production of science and technology-based startups both locally and nationally. The data, resources and outcomes/results are being disseminated using methods that allow others, outside of the Bay Area, to participate in the training. The Node is facilitating the inclusion of groups from diverse regions, economic backgrounds, and ethnicities in developing effective entrepreneurship. It is studying whether mentoring networks can provide the status and diversity contributions that teams with demographic disadvantages often lack. The data and results are made freely available via the website so that advancements can be quickly implemented and globally shared. New curriculum modules are also addressing a broader array of subjects including: mentor training, healthcare and life sciences, energy and clean technology, as well as legal and finance related issues.