Unsolicited proposal: IUCRC Evaluation Project

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IIP 1140438 North Carolina State University; Denis Gray IUCRC Evaluation Project The IUCRC program is comprised of over 50 centers with over 150 participating universities. These centers include over 750 industry members, 600 faculty scientists, 1000 graduate students and almost 250 undergraduate students. The current proposal requests support for a five-year award to support evaluation activities of the IUCRC Program. The proposed IUCRC Evaluation Project addresses both accountability and improvement evaluation issues and involves both program-level and center-level elements. The evaluation addresses three major objectives: 1) To help NSF and local centers objectively evaluate their impact by documenting IUCRC outcomes and accomplishments; 2) To promote continuous improvement by giving actionable, timely, data-based (formally collected and observational) feedback, analysis and advice to NSF and local centers; 3) To identify and communicate information about IUCRC best practices to NSF and local centers. Research and evaluation conducted through the IUCRC Evaluation Project in the past has made a significant contribution to a broadened understanding of cooperative research in general and industry/university centers in particular. The proposed work sets comparably ambitious goals and promises to make a contribution to the understanding of a variety of critical issues including the economic impact of IUCRCs, impact of IUCRCs on small firms, and human capital impacts of IUCRCs. The most unique characteristic of the IUCRC Evaluation Project is the emphasis placed on improvement evaluation for local center directors with timely evaluation data collected from key stakeholder groups. The project will be a training vehicle for the next generation of S&T evaluators by promoting high quality research opportunities for the graduate students supported by the project. Finally, the proposed work will continue to be very proactive in disseminating the findings to the broader scientific community by publishing the work in widely read and high quality journals. Further, all evaluation instruments, program reports, and student and faculty papers related to the program evaluation effort will be publicly available on the Program Evaluation Website housed on North Carolina State University servers (www.ncsu.edu/iucrc).