The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the transformation of the way technical writers and research teams write and edit technical documentation, including data dissemination reports, research proposals, and journal papers. The new toolset will ensure rapid training, high quality, and high levels of innovation in technical and scientific teams. The methodology, implemented in software, will target a broad spectrum of users, from seasoned technical writing teams to emerging solo practitioners; the training materials built into the system will be beneficial for all students and young technical writers who seek to develop more effective writing approaches. The market segmentation is broken into, in the order of market size: 1) large businesses and corporations, 2) academia and educational institutions, 3) government agencies, 4) individuals, and 5) small businesses. Commercialization will require securing partnerships with marketers, university personnel, scholarly journals, and industry professionals, as well as conducting case studies and customer discovery to quantify how the product saves teams time, reduces stress, and delivers training materials for personnel. The resulting product will facilitate the development of strong professional manuscripts for teams of all sizes at other universities and in the industry.
This I-Corps project seeks to simplify and automate some of the critical obstacles to technical writing, thereby fostering a time-efficient writing and editing environment. In the current collaborative technical writing paradigm, personnel training and inexperience are two of the biggest obstacles to successful (in terms of acceptance rates) technical documentation. Teams that adopt the new writing and editing toolset will find it easier to train new personnel, as well as coordinate writing efforts across a variety of different writing styles and skills. Senior researchers will have more time and resources to focus on the research itself, due to the optimized method of personnel training or mentorship allowed by this system. Over time, the toolset will develop into a methodology that can be broadened to help with any writing discipline, from science and engineering to law or accounting. The toolset was born out of the needs of academic technical writing teams, which produce academic documentation daily. Quantification of impact is segment-dependent. Existing case studies show an improved success of proposal submissions by 40%, with a 60% increase in writing efficiency without loss of quality (in fact, with improved quality, as indicated by the greater success of proposal acceptance).
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.
