NSF Entrepreneurial Fellowships for Increased Diversity and Impact

这一努力旨在为更大规模的国家创业生态系统奠定方案基础，以支持和指导科学家和工程师努力推出基于深度技术创新的新的高影响力企业。该项目将直接赋予不同种族、地理和性别的一系列新的翻译科学和工程领导者以推动对经济安全和竞争力至关重要的行业的尖端技术创新，包括农业、建筑、化工、计算、国防、电力、制造和交通。这一努力的成功可能会验证一个全国性的模式，即发展和维护强大的翻译研究人才库，同时推进新兴产业，解决关键的社会和经济挑战，增强美国的竞争力以及经济和国家安全，并使那些在科学和工程创新企业中代表性不足的人能够更多地参与。这一计划还将实现与NSF旗舰翻译计划的协同效应，并通过学习这些计划而得到加强，这些计划包括NSF实验室到市场平台，其中包括创新伙伴关系、小企业创新研究/小企业技术转让和创新公司。这一努力的智力价值来自于试验和评估三种新的关键方法，以增加获取机会并进一步增强全国各地的科学家和工程师的能力。第一种方法是创建一种新的创业支持模式：一个创业研究员社区，允许全国任何合格的科学家或工程师从核心奖学金支持中受益，并利用传统创新中心的集中资源，而不必搬迁到这样的中心。第二种方法是创建一个新的面对面社区，将现有模式扩展到最成熟的创业生态系统之外，这是确保能够在全国范围内创建区域中心，以驻留形式支持研究员的关键考验。第三个办法是一项重点在于增加科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)创业多样性的倡议，方法是支持传统上代表性不足的群体中的博士前科学家和工程师，让他们接触到创业精神和潜在的技术创新职业。这三项举措加在一起，旨在扩大更大规模的国家创业生态系统的影响，并提供关键经验教训，使其能够继续扩大规模，甚至产生更大的国家影响。那些成功完成该计划的人将成为美国未来的企业家领袖。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This effort seeks to lay the programmatic underpinnings for a larger-scale national entrepreneurial ecosystem to support and mentor scientists and engineers in their efforts to launch new high-impact ventures based on deep technology innovations. The project will directly empower a racially, geographically, and gender diverse set of new translational science and engineering leaders advancing cutting-edge technology innovations across sectors critical to economic security and competitiveness, including agriculture, buildings, chemicals, computing, defense, electricity, manufacturing, and transportation. Success in this effort may validate a national model for developing and maintaining a strong translational research talent pool while advancing emerging industries, addressing critical societal and economic challenges, enhancing U.S. competitiveness and economic and national security, and enabling more participation from those who have been underrepresented in the science and engineering innovation enterprise. This initiative will also enable synergies with, and be strengthened by learnings from, flagship NSF translational programs including the NSF Lab-to-Market Platform comprising Partnerships for Innovation, Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer, and Innovation Corps.The intellectual merit of this effort stems from piloting and evaluating three new critical approaches to increase access and further empower scientists and engineers across the nation. The first approach is the creation of a new modality for entrepreneurial support: a community of entrepreneurial fellows that allows any qualified scientist or engineer across the country to benefit from the core fellowship support and leverage the concentrated resources of traditional innovation centers without having to relocate to such centers. The second approach is the creation of a new in-person community that would expand the existing model beyond the most established entrepreneurial ecosystems, a critical test toward ensuring that regional hubs can be created across the nation to support fellows in an in-residence format. The third approach is an initiative focused on increasing diversity in Scienece, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) entrepreneurship by supporting pre-doctoral scientists and engineers from traditionally underrepresented populations, exposing them to entrepreneurship and potential careers in technical innovation. Taken together, these three initiatives seek to multiply the impact of a larger scale national entrepreneurial ecosystem, and provide key learnings that will allow continued scaling and even greater national impacts. Those who successfully complete the program will constitute the nation’s entrepreneurial leaders well into the future.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.