I-Corps: Curriculum and Evaluation Management

National Collegiate Inventors And Innovators Alliance, Hadley MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project funds the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (VentureWell) to support their involvement in NSF's Innovation Corps (I-Corps). VentureWell has responsibility to: recruit and train I-Corps core instructors, adjuncts, teaching assistants, and I-Corps observation deputies for workshops planned in six cities throughout the country; prepare and curate canonical I-Corps curricula; extract best-practices; prepare, disseminate, and update a Faculty Teaching Guide and Faculty Training Workbook; and, manage evaluations of I-Corps Team experiences. The NSF I-Corps programs were devised to address the challenges that the United States faces in rapidly and efficiently bringing emerging science and engineering innovations to use in industry and commerce. To maintain world leadership in scientific and engineering research and education, the USA needs processes that enable the practical and scalable application of promising discoveries from research and university laboratories. For university research to achieve greater impact, academic researchers and their students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) need tools and preparation for evaluating whether research discoveries can be readily translated into practical applications and eventual commercialization. NSF established the I-Corps programs beginning in 2011 to support NSF-funded researchers in learning how to evaluate their scientific research for commercial potential. With this project, VentureWell contributes directly to the I-Corps programs. In particular, the I-Corps programs provide NSF-funded principal investigators and their team members with funding and training enabling them to evaluate their technologies and research discoveries for commercial feasibility. The ultimate goal is to increase the economic and societal impact of NSF research funding directly, through commercialization of research, and indirectly, by equipping scientists and engineers with skills and experience in developing and testing economically scalable models for the development of a product or technology. I-Corps grantees are expected to reach a decision about the commercial readiness of their technology or product and take with them a set of skills that they can continue to apply in their careers. I-Corps participants evaluate and translate their research into applications that have commercial potential and can benefit society. Many participants will have identified promising commercial pathways that can lead to new high tech ventures or licensing opportunities. Since the program's inception, I-Corps teams have formed almost 400 companies. These companies operate in a broad range of sectors including health, energy, materials, agriculture and information technology and are geographically distributed across the United States. VentureWell is uniquely qualified to engage the I-Corps community having been catalyzing the creation of scalable science and technology ventures for more than 21 years through processes of funding, teaching, mentoring, and advising. VentureWell's mission is to increase opportunities for technological innovation and entrepreneurship, support the development science and technology-based enterprises, and facilitate access to early sources of capital so that faculty researchers and their students can take their innovative ideas to scale. Since its inception, VentureWell has trained over 1,700 early-stage innovation teams and helped launch over 788 ventures that have raised almost $900 million in public and private investment.