I-Corps: Curriculum and Evaluation Management

I-Corps：课程和评估管理

• 批准号: 1741434
• 负责人: Philip Weilerstein
• 金额: $ 136.57万
• 依托单位: National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-08-15 至 2018-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1741434&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Corps; Curriculum; Evaluation; Management

This project funds the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (VentureWell) to support their involvement in NSF's Innovation Corps (I-Corps). VentureWell has responsibility to: recruit and train I-Corps core instructors, adjuncts, teaching assistants, and I-Corps observation deputies for workshops planned in six cities throughout the country; prepare and curate canonical I-Corps curricula; extract best-practices; prepare, disseminate, and update a Faculty Teaching Guide and Faculty Training Workbook; and, manage evaluations of I-Corps Team experiences.The NSF I-Corps programs were devised to address the challenges that the United States faces in rapidly and efficiently bringing emerging science and engineering innovations to use in industry and commerce. To maintain world leadership in scientific and engineering research and education, the USA needs processes that enable the practical and scalable application of promising discoveries from research and university laboratories. For university research to achieve greater impact, academic researchers and their students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) need tools and preparation for evaluating whether research discoveries can be readily translated into practical applications and eventual commercialization. NSF established the I-Corps programs beginning in 2011 to support NSF-funded researchers in learning how to evaluate their scientific research for commercial potential. With this project, VentureWell contributes directly to the I-Corps programs. In particular, the I-Corps programs provide NSF-funded principal investigators and their team members with funding and training enabling them to evaluate their technologies and research discoveries for commercial feasibility. The ultimate goal is to increase the economic and societal impact of NSF research funding directly, through commercialization of research, and indirectly, by equipping scientists and engineers with skills and experience in developing and testing economically scalable models for the development of a product or technology. I-Corps grantees are expected to reach a decision about the commercial readiness of their technology or product and take with them a set of skills that they can continue to apply in their careers. I-Corps participants evaluate and translate their research into applications that have commercial potential and can benefit society. Many participants will have identified promising commercial pathways that can lead to new high tech ventures or licensing opportunities. Since the program's inception, I-Corps teams have formed almost 400 companies. These companies operate in a broad range of sectors including health, energy, materials, agriculture and information technology and are geographically distributed across the United States.VentureWell is uniquely qualified to engage the I-Corps community having been catalyzing the creation of scalable science and technology ventures for more than 21 years through processes of funding, teaching, mentoring, and advising. VentureWell's mission is to increase opportunities for technological innovation and entrepreneurship, support the development science and technology-based enterprises, and facilitate access to early sources of capital so that faculty researchers and their students can take their innovative ideas to scale. Since its inception, VentureWell has trained over 1,700 early-stage innovation teams and helped launch over 788 ventures that have raised almost $900 million in public and private investment.

该项目资助国家大学发明家和创新者联盟 (VentureWell)，以支持他们参与 NSF 创新军团 (I-Corps)。 VentureWell 负责： 为计划在全国六个城市举办的研讨会招募和培训 I-Corps 核心讲师、兼职人员、助教和 I-Corps 观察代表；准备和策划规范的 I-Corps 课程；提取最佳实践；准备、传播和更新教师教学指南和教师培训工作手册； NSF I-Corps 项目旨在解决美国在快速有效地将新兴科学和工程创新应用于工业和商业方面所面临的挑战。为了保持在科学和工程研究和教育方面的世界领先地位，美国需要能够对研究和大学实验室的有前途的发现进行实际和可扩展应用的流程。为了使大学研究产生更大影响，科学、技术、工程和数学 (STEM) 领域的学术研究人员及其学生需要工具和准备来评估研究发现是否可以轻松转化为实际应用和最终商业化。 NSF 从 2011 年开始设立 I-Corps 计划，以支持 NSF 资助的研究人员学习如何评估其科学研究的商业潜力。通过该项目，VentureWell 直接为 I-Corps 计划做出贡献。特别是，I-Corps 项目为 NSF 资助的主要研究人员及其团队成员提供资金和培训，使他们能够评估其技术和研究发现的商业可行性。最终目标是通过研究商业化直接增加 NSF 研究经费的经济和社会影响，并通过为科学家和工程师提供开发和测试产品或技术开发的经济可扩展模型的技能和经验来间接增加 NSF 研究经费的经济和社会影响。 I-Corps 受资助者应就其技术或产品的商业准备程度做出决定，并携带一套可以继续在其职业生涯中应用的技能。 I-Corps 参与者评估他们的研究并将其转化为具有商业潜力并造福社会的应用。许多参与者将发现有前景的商业途径，可以带来新的高科技企业或许可机会。自该计划启动以来，I-Corps 团队已组建了近 400 个连队。这些公司业务涉及健康、能源、材料、农业和信息技术等广泛领域，分布在美国各地。VentureWell 拥有独特的资格来参与 I-Corps 社区，21 年来一直通过资助、教学、指导和建议流程促进可扩展的科技企业的创建。 VentureWell 的使命是增加技术创新和创业的机会，支持科技型企业的发展，并促进获得早期资金来源，以便教师研究人员和他们的学生能够将他们的创新想法规模化。自成立以来，VentureWell 已培训了 1,700 多个早期创新团队，帮助创办了超过 788 家企业，并筹集了近 9 亿美元的公共和私人投资。