I-Corps: Training and Evaluation

National Collegiate Inventors And Innovators Alliance, Hadley MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project, from The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, Inc. (VentureWell), coordinates, convenes, and evaluates the National Innovation Network and its Innovation Corps (I-Corps) programs. Through this project, VentureWell connects national programs to form the "National Innovation Network" (NIN). This emerging community of innovators represents a key component of NSF's I-Corps programs. With the NIN, NSF accelerates the development of a national innovation ecosystem that reaches deeply and broadly across the country to engage the most creative and consequential research discoveries and talents in the process of entrepreneurship. The NIN is composed of clusters of universities that support the I-Corps Nodes -- the primary training group for the I-Corps national course teams; the I-Corps Sites -- that include the individual institutions dedicated to spurring on very early stage teams; the Teams -- that focus on market validation of technology innovations; and organizational stakeholders such as mentors who support the teams, and venture development partners such as angel investors, venture capitalists and other types of investors. The role of VentureWell in the advancing of the NIN involves seven primary activities: 1. Commission teaching teams for eleven NSF I-Corps National Team Trainings 2. Implement I-Corps Faculty Training 3. Convene an I-Corps Faculty Summit 4. Design and implement Teaching Assistant Training 5. Organize and implement the annual National Innovation Network conference that brings together all of the Nodes and Sites 6. Prepare, disseminate and archive the curriculum and curate best practices for pedagogical improvements 7. Conduct Ongoing Course Evaluation A particular focus of this project is VentureWell's research and assessment of formative and summative evaluation of I-Corps Team experiences in cohorts as well as related dissemination activity. The formative evaluation is designed to understand participants' satisfaction with the cohort and course and perspective on the course environment, to understand the quality of instruction, and to assess knowledge gains. The evaluation involves the administration, response rate monitoring, data collection, and cleaning of four surveys: (i) pre-course, (ii) after kickoff, (iii) after week-3 of course weekly webinars, and (iv) post-course. The summative evaluation is designed to track individual and team outcomes of interest to NSF and assess the impact of the course at approximately one year and 3.5 years after formal participation in the program ends. Finally, dissemination activities are designed to ensure that key program information is shared with appropriate audiences. In addition, VentureWell is creating public-use datasets. These datasets contain de-identified data from the pre-course, post-course and longitudinal outcomes surveys in order to disseminate information about the program to the I-Corps research community and allow others to use these data in their research.