I-Corps: Continuation and Expansion of Training and Evaluation Support

The I-Corps program aims to increase the economic and societal impact of NSF research funding and other research funding by facilitating translation of technologies from the laboratory and enabling commercialization. In addition, the I-Corps Program is designed to begin to equip scientists and engineers with skills and experience in developing economically scalable business 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. Approximately 50% of 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 2700 additional individual I-Corps participants. The proposed effort also will generate additional I-Corps instructors to increase the faculty pool, enhance the program pedagogy, and advance the systematic data collection and tracking of teams immediately participating in the program. NSF established the I-Corps entrepreneurial training program in 2011 to train NSF-funded and other researchers how to evaluate the commercial potential of their scientific research in science and engineering. 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 instructional 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. Through the work proposed starting in FY 2024 and ending in FY 2026, VentureWell will support the virtual training of the National I-Corps Program and the Beat-the-Odds Boot Camp while facilitating the curation and dissemination of the pedagogical learnings to enable further development of the National I-Corps instructors. VentureWell will continue to facilitate 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 I-Corps as a foundational entrepreneur training program to reach innovators across the country. 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.