Engineering Research Centers Stakeholder Workshops

美国国家科学基金会(NSF)建立了工程研究中心(ERC)计划，以促进协作、跨学科和创新的工程研究和教育。ERC项目将学术界、产业界和政府聚集在一起，共同开展研究，以产生变革性的工程系统，满足并创造出满足21世纪社会需求的解决方案。NSF越来越多地致力于支持ERC不仅考虑潜在用户和潜在买家的需求和观点--这是翻译和商业化过程中的标准--而且还考虑可能受到新创新影响的其他利益攸关方的观点。从研究开始到整个创新过程，不断地将研究的价值框定到一个全面的利益相关者社区，将有助于研究人员更丰富地想象其后果。为支持这一目标，VentureWell提议与ERC领导人组织和促进两个半天的研讨会，2022年春夏举行虚拟活动，然后于2022年9月举行面对面聚会。这些研讨会的目的是探索是否需要一个利益相关者工作组，如果需要，为工作组定义一个章程。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。

The National Science Foundation (NSF) established the Engineering Research Centers (ERC) program to advance collaborative, interdisciplinary, and innovative engineering research and education. The ERC program brings together academia, industry, and government in a partnership to jointly conduct research that will lead to transformative engineering systems that address and create solutions to 21st-centurysocietal needs. Increasingly, NSF aims to support ERCs in considering not only the needs and perspectives of potential users and potential buyers—as is standard in the translation and commercialization process—but the perspectives of other stakeholders potentially affected by new innovations as well. Continuous framing of the value of the research to a comprehensive stakeholdercommunity from its initiation and throughout the innovation process will help researchers more richly imagine its consequences. In support of this aim, VentureWell proposes to organize and facilitate two half-day workshops with ERC leaders, a virtual event in the Spring/Summer of 2022 followed by an in-person gathering in September 2022. The purpose of these workshops is to explore whether a Stakeholder Working Group is needed and if so, to define a charter for the working group.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.