Business Encounters: Life Scientist Simulation Experience to Enhance Entrepreneurial Intent and Self-efficacy

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Business Encounters: Life Scientist Simulation Experience to Enhance Entrepreneurial Intent and Self-efficacy In FY 2019, the NIH invested $26 billion in 49,000 research project grants. Commercialization of that work is essential to the nations health and driven by a vibrant community of biomedical startups, incubators and funding options. Life scientists are key to those startups yet women life scientists are underrepresented. Barriers to women from the earliest stages of activity results in decreased intent, confidence, entrepreneurship, and downstream funding. This gap in obtaining value from potential women life science entrepreneurs is both wasteful and unacceptable; this project intends to address that gap. Phase II development of Business Encounters: Life Scientist completes a 3D simulation product that engages early-career women scientists, from graduate students to post-docs to funded investigators. In a simulation and training experience as women life scientists role-play challenges to established barriers and seek guidance from simulated advisors, they • identify barriers, • establish their level of entrepreneurial intent, • define a pathway to overcome barriers to entrepreneurship, practice the necessary skills, and • build self-efficacy. Phase I successfully established the feasibility of Business Encounters: Life Scientist and laid the groundwork for Phases II and III. We worked with 8 women Primary Investigators with expertise in life science, entrepreneurship, business, assessment and evaluation (SBIR), as well soliciting feedback from 34 women life scientists in the earlier stages of their career and 8 men with experience with life science or entrepreneurship. Based on this, we clarified the need, created a simulation design, developed, tested and refined a single-scenario prototype, and outlined a plan for Phase II and Phase III commercialization. We found strong support for a solution to fill the above gap despite low confidence in entrepreneurial ability. We identified enthusiasm for guidance to identify and overcome barriers, within an interactive simulation framework. The thoroughly tested prototype was refined through successive usability rounds until all usability issues were addressed. Eventually 100% of participants agreed they would recommend the experience to women interested in pursuing entrepreneurship. Phase II completes development using the same strong team approach. A summative evaluation with a pre-/post-intervention design with wait-list control assesses impact on 80 women life scientists’ 1) entrepreneurial intention, 2) entrepreneurial self-efficacy, 3) factors that affect entrepreneurship, and 4) entrepreneurial attitudes toward availability of support, career change, and the challenge of commercialization.