EAGER: Pathway to Commercialization at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)

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Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) exert an outsized influence on the production of Black STEM majors, relative to Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), yet they often lack the financial resources and infrastructure needed to support technology commercialization. Development of technology transfer resources at HBCUs could directly impact a significant proportion of African American scientists and engineers, and the African American tech-entrepreneurial pipeline. This project seeks to explore the technology and technology transfer infrastructure at a subset of HBCUs with Computer Science and Engineering Departments. It will investigate PWIs with consortium models in their approach to technology transfer offices in an effort to understand the feasibility of HBCUs to establish similar consortium models. Further, it will identify best practices among consortium models that hold the most promise for the HBCU environment.The Pathways to Commercialization for HBCUs project seeks to explore the technology and technology transfer infrastructure at a subset of ABET-accredited HBCUs and CISE-funded HBCUs. The project will investigate PWIs with consortium models in their approach to technology transfer offices in an effort to understand the feasibility of HBCUs to establish similar consortium models. Customer discovery will be conducted to identify both assets and pain points from technology commercialization administrators and faculty at the participating HBCUs. Additional discovery will be conducted with PWIs that have some elements of their TTO functions centralized. The work will be guided by the following research questions: 1) What is the current capacity of HBCUs to perform technology transfer; 2) To what extent do HBCUs view technology commercialization as a business opportunity; 3) What are the differences in faculty incentives for technology commercialization at research intensive research institutions vs HBCUs; and 4) Can a subset of potential shared activities be identified to improve technology commercialization at HBCUs? The goal of the customer discovery is to answer those questions. In particular, the project aims to identify best practices among consortium models that hold the most promise for the HBCU environment. A virtual convening will be held to discuss findings from the customer discovery, conduct design thinking sessions, and adopt a set of recommendations for implementing best practices.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.