I-Corps Sites: Bridging the Gap: Dartmouth's I-Corps Site for Translating Science and Technology Discoveries to Value

Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

Investigators

Abstract

This project, from Dartmouth College, creates an Innovation Corps Site. NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Sites are NSF-funded entities established at universities whose purpose is to nurture and support multiple, local teams to transition their technology concepts into the marketplace. Sites provide infrastructure, advice, resources, networking opportunities, training and modest funding to enable groups to transition their work into the marketplace or into becoming I-Corps Team applicants. I-Corps Sites also strengthen innovation locally and regionally and contribute to the National Innovation Network of mentors, researchers, entrepreneurs and investors. Dartmouth's I-Corps Site provides intensive entrepreneurial training following the Lean LaunchPad curriculum and resources for customer discovery and market need analysis to 90-112 teams of students, faculty, researchers, and mentors. The program bridges campus wide research in science, engineering, medicine, and student projects, all of which can lead to potential innovations - with Dartmouth's suite of entrepreneurial services offered through its Office of Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer (OETT). The intellectual merit of Dartmouth's I-Corps Site is the creation of a consistent curriculum that helps scientists, engineers, and students frame their discoveries in the context of how they can be used outside of the academic institution. The program helps a nascent entrepreneurs to place their discovery into one of three categories: continued academic exploration, pursuit of its use within the market discovered through program participation, or reevaluation with the intent of determining whether a market and need exists in a completely different area. The objective of the Dartmouth I-Corps Site is to engage and equip more students and researchers at all levels - undergraduate, graduate, post-doctoral, and faculty - to move their discoveries out of academia and into the marketplace. Dartmouth I-Corps Lean LaunchPad workshops are held twice annually during Dartmouth's interim periods in December and June. Using the workshops as a springboard and seed funding from the grant, teams perform customer discovery, form a value proposition, and determine market need and size beginning with the workshop and for a three-month period following the workshop. After completing the program, participants are prepared to either rethink their discovery or move forward with commercialization. If a team concludes that a discovery has commercial value, the team will be well positioned to take advantage of the support of the OETT, the NSF I-Corps program, Dartmouth's alumni support network, local angel investors, and other organizations. Broader Impacts: The broader impacts of this program lie in its objective to create a campus environment that fosters innovation and produces graduates who understand and can engage in defining value and identifying need as they launch their careers. Dartmouth's enrollment of underrepresented minorities and women in its undergraduate and graduate STEM programs significantly exceed national averages; women represent 42% and 48%, respectively, of the current senior and junior engineering classes, and 30% of declared Computer Science majors. Sciences consistently enroll approximately 50% women. The engineering school's first-of-its-kind Ph.D. Innovation program, established in 2008, has graduated 30% women or underrepresented minorities. Feeders into Dartmouth's I-Corps Sites program come from courses and research laboratories from across Dartmouth's college of Arts & Sciences and three professional schools and all levels and engage these traditionally underrepresented populations in innovation as a natural outcome of the project activities. In order to broaden impact to the years beyond the I-Corps grant, investigators will use project outcomes to seek alumni support for offering of the Site curriculum and seed funding programs semi-annually.