NSF Entrepreneurial Fellowships for Increased Diversity and Impact

这项工作旨在为更大规模的国家创业生态系统奠定项目基础，以支持和指导科学家和工程师在深度技术创新的基础上推出新的高影响力企业。该项目将直接赋予种族、地域和性别多样化的新一代转化型科学和工程领导者力量，推动对经济安全和竞争力至关重要的领域的尖端技术创新，包括农业、建筑、化工、计算机、国防、电力、制造业和交通运输。这项工作的成功可能会验证一个国家模式，即在发展和维持强大的转化研究人才库的同时，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、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更多地参与进来。该计划还将与国家科学基金会旗舰转化项目（包括由创新伙伴关系、小企业创新研究/小企业技术转移和创新队组成的国家科学基金会实验室到市场平台）产生协同效应，并通过学习得到加强。这项工作的智力价值源于对三种新的关键方法的试点和评估，这些方法可以增加全国各地的科学家和工程师的获取和进一步授权。第一种方法是创造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，而不必搬迁到这些中心。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，这是一个关键的测试，以确保在全国范围内创建区域中心，以驻地形式支持研究员。第三种方法是一项旨在增加科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）创业多样性的倡议，通过支持传统上代表性不足的人口中的博士前科学家和工程师，使他们接触到创业和技术创新方面的潜在职业。综上所述，这三项倡议旨在扩大更大规模的国家创业生态系统的影响，并提供关键的经验教训，使其能够继续扩大规模，甚至产生更大的国家影响。那些成功完成该项目的人将在未来成为美国的企业家领袖。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.