EAGER: What is the Economic Impact of NSF-Funded Research? Connecting the Dots Between Scientific Discovery and Entrepreneurship

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Broadly defined, entrepreneurship is the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of profitable opportunities. In the context of NSF-funded science and engineering research, entrepreneurship can range from a graduate student starting a new company based on knowledge gained through an NSF-funded graduate research fellowship program to researchers licensing a new technology developed through an NSF-funded center. This project focuses on identifying examples of entrepreneurship in NSF-funded science and engineering research, which will help better document the economic impact of NSF-funded research (e.g., new companies started, technology licensed) as well as better understand the conditions under which scientific discovery results in entrepreneurship. This project will survey the landscape of entrepreneurial activities engaged in by NSF-funded research projects (year 1) and conduct qualitative interviews with a representative sample of these projects (year 2). The research aims to broaden, beyond patents, the ways in which the economic impact of NSF-funded research is measured. These measures include new companies that are started based on the research, hardware and software developed during the research that are incorporated into commercial products, and technology originating from the research that is licensed to a company. In addition to furthering the scientific understanding of entrepreneurship, a potentially transformative outcome of this research is discovering ways that NSF could better support entrepreneurship, thus increasing the potential for economic impact from science and engineering research. Furthermore, identifying practices that successful investigators use could boost entrepreneurship among researchers in an increasingly knowledge-intensive economy, as the US looks for new ways to foster start-up companies and create jobs.