Strengthening an Inclusive Innovation Ecosystem through an Historically Black Colleges and Universities Community of Practice

Since 2017 with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has led efforts to support inclusive innovation by specifically developing and leveraging the talent at HBCUs and their potential to serve as economic engines in their local communities and leaders in the innovation arena. The AAAS HBCU Innovation Initiative via it’s Community of Practice (CoP) has provided training, mentoring, and resourcing of over 350 HBCU students and faculty from 38 institutions to develop innovations addressing grand challenges and global issues framed by the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This three-year project will build upon the CoP’s goal of creating and leveraging an inclusive innovation ecosystem to empower HBCU students and faculty to not only pursue, but lead national efforts in the invention, innovation, making, and entrepreneurship arena. Anticipated outcomes from the inclusive innovation ecosystem include fostering the transdisciplinary talent at HBCUs and positioning students and faculty to become change makers to solve the grand challenges in their community, the U.S., and globally. The targeted project activities will provide students with a stronger sense of identity in seeing themselves as inventors, innovators, makers, and entrepreneurs. Faculty will be empowered to support student innovation career pathways and receive training and resources to lead innovation efforts in their classrooms and research labs. This project will advance the field by providing knowledge of best practices and strategies in broadening participation in innovation related areas and advancing innovation capacity at HBCUs by employing a CoP and inclusive ecosystems as models and frameworks. The embedded research study will engage and leverage the expertise of HBCU social science researchers as collaborative partners in knowledge generation on how best to advance innovation capacity at HBCUs. This key stakeholder partnership and participatory research approach with HBCU scholars will lay the foundation for future efforts to identify, scale and sustain institutional capacity building in innovation on HBCU campuses. Activities will equip HBCU students and faculty with the training and resources to develop innovation related prototypes addressing critical societal issues. Mentoring, coaching and training will assist students and faculty in serving as innovation leaders on their campuses. An external evaluation team will assess the overall project impacts, and to address the specific research questions that will guide the research study. The activities align with the following objectives: 1) Expand and scale student and faculty training in innovation, tech transfer, and product commercialization through participation in the AAAS HBCU Making and Innovation Showcase, 2) Expand faculty training to include a targeted pd and leadership track, 3) Advance on-campus capacity building, 4) Expand the CoP to leverage new strategic collaborative partnerships, and 5) Advance the evidence base on inclusive innovation via an embedded research study. 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.