I-Corps: Ongoing Training, Evaluation, and Tracking of Program Impact

National Collegiate Inventors And Innovators Alliance, Hadley MA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact of this award is to support the goals of the NSF I-Corps program to increase the economic and societal impact of NSF research funding directly, through enabling 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. The structured, repeatable program that has been developed engages a national community of institutions and faculty to deliver the training and support these outcomes. Through the work proposed here, this project supports the training of more than 500 additional participants, supports the training of additional faculty to increase the diversity of the faculty pool and maintain fidelity of the program pedagogy, continues conducting systematic data collection and tracking of teams immediately before and long after formal participation in the program, and creates and disseminates datasets of use to both novice and experienced researchers in the field as well as the dissemination of scalable systems for impact measurement that provide both a framework that can be adopted by others in the field. The systems created through this work, and the insights gained, will advance the understanding of how best to track venture outcomes and assess the impact of early-stage entrepreneurial support programming. This NSF project will support the evaluation of I-Corps program outcomes and tracking of program impact in a systematic and timely way. This work is important to the operation of a consistent, high-fidelity program at scale and to the measurement of long term program results and an understanding of what works. The core intellectual merit of this work is insight into the program's impact, both economic outcomes and participants' career and research outcomes, over time. To gain this insight, the project evaluates the delivery of each cohort, administers a longitudinal outcomes survey, and tracks venture outcomes independently to verify program impact data. Working with NSF, the project makes these datasets accessible to the research community to enable the continued study of how best to support emerging science and technology innovation. The processes and data systems that efficiently track outcomes and provide insights into the development of technology-based products and ventures are a product of this project, as well. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.