Engineering Research Centers Stakeholder Workshops

National Collegiate Inventors And Innovators Alliance, Hadley MA

Investigators

Abstract

The National Science Foundation (NSF) established the Engineering Research Centers (ERC) program to advance collaborative, interdisciplinary, and innovative engineering research and education. The ERC program brings together academia, industry, and government in a partnership to jointly conduct research that will lead to transformative engineering systems that address and create solutions to 21st-centurysocietal needs. Increasingly, NSF aims to support ERCs in considering not only the needs and perspectives of potential users and potential buyers—as is standard in the translation and commercialization process—but the perspectives of other stakeholders potentially affected by new innovations as well. Continuous framing of the value of the research to a comprehensive stakeholder community from its initiation and throughout the innovation process will help researchers more richly imagine its consequences. In support of this aim, VentureWell proposes to organize and facilitate two half-day workshops with ERC leaders, a virtual event in the Spring/Summer of 2022 followed by an in-person gathering in September 2022. The purpose of these workshops is to explore whether a Stakeholder Working Group is needed and if so, to define a charter for the working group. 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.