The Los Angeles economy, the nation's second largest, is anchored by the health care, aerospace and defense industries. It is now also home to the rapidly growing Silicon Beach technology corridor, which spawns exciting new startups in software, digital and interactive media, renewable energy and a plethora of others. With one of the largest populations of graduating engineers in the country and a large manufacturing base, the Los Angeles region is ideally poised for a substantial transformation of its innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. The Los Angeles Regional I-Corps Node will help accelerate this transformation, by helping to increase the potential for leveraging the region's products and services. The University of Southern California led Node, consisting of a partnership between the University of Southern California, the University of California Los Angeles, and the California Institute of Technology, will improve the region's ecosystem by: modeling how to leverage regional strengths to support commercialization nationally; studying team and customer-network formation; aligning technology and organizational maturity paths; and determining institutional support mechanisms to accelerate team coalescence, technology-to-product transformation, and customer acquisition. The Node will contribute to the NSF's mission of empowering STEM students, technical professionals, researchers and entrepreneurs to actively and effectively translate innovative ideas into large-scale commercialization. Annual I-Corps training sessions will be created that combine the strength of the partner institutions to offer new regional entrepreneurial opportunities and contribute novel resources to the I-Corps National Innovation Network (NIN). Two efforts will specifically focus on extending the Lean Start-up model to established industries in the Los Angeles region. The first will focus on health-care engineering, including a 'Mobile Demo Day' that will educate researchers on the convergence of engineering and medicine, regulatory hurdles, insurance strategies, medical industry distribution models, and related issues. The second will focus on aerospace and defense; offering unparalleled access to insight, mentoring, and opportunities to technologists in this area, along with strategies that can be used to develop an alignment with large-scale system integrators.
The Node will provide a vibrant research center for commercialization processes and outcomes. It will examine founding team formation, the coalescence of engineering talent with business skills, and customer and alliance development that cultivates relationships with industry incumbents. The research will also focus on evaluating and improving entrepreneurial skills in technology maturity assessments, understanding the level of technology maturity required for industrial adoption, and identifying institutional support mechanism for accelerating commercialization. The hypothesis that technology and organizational maturity proceed along independent and often unsynchronized timelines will be tested to better understand their interactions and identify factors that will increase success. Data from investors, customers, and advisors will help provide an awareness of each entrepreneur's stakeholder network and recognize correlations involved with both the activity and duration of fundraising. In a similar vein, the Node will study the duration to first sales, acquisition of government grants, and other milestones in cash generation. These factors will be tied to technology development milestones in order to identify relationships and key drivers, such as the importance of prospective customers and investors in accelerating operational cash flow to the company (i.e., through sales, rather than financing). Short-term outcomes will contribute to an understanding of the relative importance of various roles and dependencies. Longer-term outcomes will contribute to an improvement in the performance of regional teams. The Node's website will contribute videos, slide decks, and related materials to the NIN, including a 'Needs and Deals' section where local deals that seek specialized guidance will be advertised. The website will also post bios and contact information for vetted mentors who can assist companies in other regions of the country.
