Conference: Accelerating Innovation Discovery and Commercialization Translation: A National Dialogue with the Innovation Community

The broader impact of the proposed conference is to open a dialogue among various stakeholders in the innovation community to better understand the need for technology translation. The conference aims to bring together individuals from over eight different sectors of the innovation ecosystem for a cross-sector dialogue, resulting in a “National Innovation Roadmap Report,” which will be published and freely available. The intellectual merit of the proposed conference will be to address a fundamental fragmentation in the American innovation ecosystem of persistent disconnect between discovery and commercialization. Various stakeholders, such as startups, small businesses, university researchers, technology transfer professionals, investors, corporations, philanthropist, and I-Corps instructors hold distinct critical knowledge about innovation translation, and the conference will facilitate dialogues among these stakeholders, which will result in better understanding of important gaps in translational research and commercialization of technologies. 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.