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A Bright Idea: Teaching Educators To Be Entrepreneurs

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Several years ago the National Science Foundation surveyed the small businesses that had won its innovation research grants (through the SBIR program) to see how they were progressing five and ten years after their awards. While there were unquestionably many successes, of those companies that failed, or where the SBIR-funded projects didn’t go well, the most common reason was that companies made products no one wanted.

In other words, for what was typically regarded as a grant to fund risky R&D, the biggest reason for failure was market failure . Perhaps similar reasons exist when education innovations don’t get widely disseminated?

Displaying an impressive amount of entrepreneurial vigor, some enterprising folks at NSF set out to fix this. Subra Suresh, who was then head of NSF asked the NSF Engineering and Computer and Information Sciences directorates to develop a “mentorship” program to increase the economic impact of its research portfolio.

The task fell upon the desk of Errol Arkilic, who at the time was a senior NSF SBIR program manager. Errol and a core NSF team that included Babu DasGupta, Anita LaSalle and Don Millard ran with it.

They reached out to Steve Blank, a successful serial entrepreneur who was teaching a class at Stanford he created called the Lean LaunchPad (which has been responsible for creating the whole Lean Startup movement and which has completely changed the way entrepreneurship is taught).

The Lean LaunchPad (LLP) class puts a formal methodology around the process for starting a new entrepreneurial venture. It assumes that all of the commercial assumptions are simply untested hypotheses. Students are exhorted to “get out of the building” to test these hypotheses and do what experienced entrepreneurs have always known—you really need to understand your customers and your markets before you start building something. Products are developed incrementally, securing customer feedback at each iteration.

In the LLP the folks at NSF saw a solution to their problem. They cajoled Steve Blank to work with them modifying his Stanford class for the NSF and thus the Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program was born.

Steve Blank teaching I-Corps at Stanford

In the I-Corps program, teams are comprised of three members:  A PI (principal investigator) who has received funding from NSF in the past for his/her research, an entrepreneurial lead and a mentor. The first cohort of 21 teams, which began in October 2011, was taught at Stanford by Blank.

I was a mentor for one of those teams working with a chemistry professor and one of his graduate students from the University of Illinois. I became a disciple of the method.

NSF has expanded I-Corps throughout the country. The program has also been leveraged by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health to accelerate the commercialization of cleantech and life sciences innovations, respectively.

Both Steve Blank and I were invited witnesses in a hearing convened by the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the House of Representatives in July 2012 into the effectiveness of the I-Corps program and the appropriateness of teaching entrepreneurship to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) researchers. The hearing was co-chaired by Dan Lipinski who, as one of the few Ph.D. engineers and educators in Congress, has been a big supporter of the I-Corps program.

All that was well and good until Don Millard had the bright idea that educators, distinct from scientists and engineers, could also benefit from the I-Corps curriculum. “The time from idea to impact was just too long,” says Karl Smith, who is an engineering professor at both the University of Minnesota and Purdue University. Thus the I-Corps L (for learning) program was born.

Modeled after the regular I-Corps program, the “L” variant works with educators as PIs whose innovations are teaching methods and curricula. Smith was tapped to lead the teaching team. I-Corps L was piloted in 2014 with nine teams and recently formally kicked off with its first full cohort of 24 teams.

I just came back from three days in San Francisco for the kickoff of the I-Corps L program where I reprised my role as a mentor, this time working with a team from Northern Illinois University.

I-Corps L uses the same texts and teaching methodology as the regular I-Corps program. Only this time instead of a room full of scientists and engineers, we had a room full of STEM educators/teachers evaluating the sustainability (and for some teams the commercial potential) of their learning innovations.

Our team, called Tinkering Labs, is exploring the idea of teaching STEM concepts to K-12 students by letting them do hands-on projects that use a variety of tools from traditional hand tools to more modern implements such as 3D printers and laser cutters. The idea grew out of the Brightworks movement in San Francisco.

Maker spaces (which by implication are non-profit) are everywhere these days, but our team is exploring whether a for-profit company that would entertain kids while also developing their STEM capacity would be a sustainable business. Think of Gymboree meets Mathnasium.

I asked Don Millard, now acting Division Director of Engineering, Education and Centers at NSF why they felt the need to create this new program, “Educational change moves at a geological rate because of the sheer vastness of the ecosystem. There isn’t a clear understanding of what processes offer the greatest success in getting an educational innovation into a widely adopted practice or utilization. What we’re attempting to do is to provide teams with tools to DRAMATICALLY [his emphasis] reduce the cycle time from an idea to impact. This will help our nation stay competitive in a much more innovative world.”

Karl Smith told me, “The problem in education training is how to scale it up. It’s been an enormous frustration to me over the past 40 years that great ideas don’t get into widespread practice.” Karl went on to cite Steve Blank when he explained that there are two aspects to innovation. First, you need evidence from the research. You also need a sustainable and scalable model for propagating it.

Current educational efforts focus only on the first, but successful efforts require both. Karl calls this “evidence-based entrepreneurship” (again he credits Blank) and the process is counter-intuitive to many STEM and education researchers. He speaks of the “impedance mismatch” between educators and entrepreneurs, which not ironically is exactly the same thing I noticed following my first I-Corps experience in 2011.

The thing that’s interesting about the “L” version of I-Corps is whether educators, as opposed to researchers or technologists, could be taught to drink the Kool-Aid.

Millard made it very clear in his opening presentation at I-Corps L that success in NSF’s eyes is not defined by a team’s decision to launch a business. Success is defined, instead, by teaching them the tools to allow them to make a confident go/nogo decision.

Dr. Brianno Coller, Presidential Teaching Professor in the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at Northern Illinois University, is the PI of the team I’m on. I asked him his impressions of the I-Corps L programming following the first bootcamp.

"My participation in the I-Corps L program so far has been eye-opening, in a good way. It started with Steve Blank's emphatic declaration that a startup is NOT a scaled-down version of a business. Instead, it is a discovery process. Being an engineer, I see it as a design process.

"The idea of the business model as represented by the business model canvas appeals to me. The idea, as I see it, is to depict the dynamics of a business as a complex interaction of the business model components: customer segments, value propositions, channels, etc. We engineers do things like this when we model complex systems (e.g., the flight characteristics of high performance aircraft). The difference, though, is that the component interactions in the flight dynamics model are the result of deterministic physics. In contrast, interactions in the business model are determined by the squishy dynamics of human behavior.

"Nonetheless, it appears that we might be able to perform some degree of system identification by interviewing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people...by testing specific hypotheses of how components of the business model interact. It's interesting, real interesting.

"In the world of engineering education, so many promising interventions fail to catch on. There are huge barriers to widespread adoption. Now I'm seeing the barriers as a lack of product/market fit. I now see the customer discovery process as one that could really help. I'm excited to see how it will work."

I love the term “the squishy dynamics of human behavior”. An engineering professor contrasting the process of starting a business to a complex system like an aircraft speaks loudly to why I-Corps exists.

Steve Blank’s had this to say about the I-Corps L, “We knew I-Corps educators can turn research into startups, but now I-Corps will educate the educators. The result will be a huge leap in the number of innovative tools, products and services for students and educators.”

The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) is providing all the logistic support for I-Corps L, and the ASEE website is the best source for further information. We're on week two of a ten week program. I'll report back at the end to see what the impressions are of Dr. Coller and the other educators following the completion of the program.

Neil Kane (@neildkane) is the president of Illinois Partners which helps companies, universities and investors with innovation strategies and technology commercialization.