The I-Corps rogram aims to increase the economic and societal impact of NSF research funding by enabling the commercialization of research and by equipping scientists and engineers with skills and experience in developing economically-scalable models for technology commercialization. Program participants focus on learning and using a structured process that enables them to gather input from users and potential customers to evaluate and define a translational path from fundamental research into applications that have commercial potential and societal benefit. Many I-Corps teams go on to form companies operating in a broad range of sectors including health, energy, materials, agriculture, and information technology. This structured, repeatable program engages a national community of institutions and faculty to deliver training that results in economic outcomes. Through the proposed work, VentureWell will support the training of more than 1500 additional individual I-Corps participants. The proposed effort will also generate additional I-Corps faculty to increase the diversity of the faculty pool, enhance the program pedagogy, and advance the systematic data collection and tracking of teams immediately before and long after formal participation in the program.
NSF established the I-Corps training program in 2011 to train NSF-funded researchers how to evaluate the commercial potential of their scientific research. VentureWell's evaluation of program outcomes and tracking of program impact in a systematic, timely way has been critical to the operation of a consistent, effective, high-fidelity program at scale, and to the measurement of long-term program results. The core intellectual merit of this work is the insight provided into the program's impact — both economic outcomes and participants' career and research outcomes — over time. To gain this insight, VentureWell evaluates the delivery of each cohort, administers a longitudinal outcomes survey, and tracks venture outcomes independently to verify program impact data. The processes and data systems that efficiently track outcomes and provide insights into the development of technology-based ventures are a product of this work as well. VentureWell will support the transformation of all training to have virtual offering options while curating and disseminating pedagogical learnings to enable further development of the national I-Corps faculty. VentureWell will continue to work within the National Innovation Network (NIN) to disseminate effective course practices, outcomes, and impact enabling the NIN to effectively adopt and institutionalize these approaches. This support will further NSF's goal of advancing this high-impact program providing leadership in the national innovation ecosystem through NSF I-Corps.
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.
