“I knew that I was floundering in getting my curriculum project out to teachers and students and that I needed something that was going to push me to move forward and to find out all the answers I was looking for,” she says. “I needed that structure, because I’m not a business-minded person.”

I-Corps™ L encourages previous NSF grant recipients to take their “discoveries and promising practices from education research and development… to widespread adoption, adaptation, and utilization.” Teams who go through the program receive support – mentoring and funding – to “accelerate innovation in learning that can be successfully scaled, in a sustainable manner.”

Moore, who describes herself as a researcher and curriculum developer, was accepted into the program, even though she did not want to start a company around her research work.

“I needed someone to push me towards finding a model that would actually get it out to teachers,” she says, “and it ended up being something where I learned a lot.”

Being involved requires a big commitment. The program begins with a three-day meeting, followed by five, once-a-week sessions via online conferencing, and it wraps up with a two-day session presenting the results of their market-analysis and their business model. Teams are made up of the principal investigator, an entrepreneurial lead, and a mentor with some previous business experience. Each one must interview at least 100 potential customers.

“They warned us that it would take 20 hours a week extra, beyond your work, but they’re talking to you as a team,” Moore says. “It took each of us 20 hours a week to do it. It was an immense amount of work.”

“The idea is developing what they call the entrepreneurial mindset,” says Karl Smith, I-Corps for Learning principal investigator and lead instructor. “It’s this way of thinking about getting innovations out there into widespread, scalable, and sustainable use.”

Smith, who is a part-time Cooperative Learning Professor with ENE and the Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor and Emeritus Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota, says creating a business is not the only way to be “successful” in the program.

“It depends on what’s the most promising path for that innovation, he says. “You have what you think is a pretty good idea. So, the next step is probably some kind of funding to actually develop something more viable and then continue getting it out there.”

He says venture funding, crowd funding or entering into an agreement with an established company are all “successful” endings for the teams as is making a “No Go” decision that sometimes occurs after exploring all possible customers.

NSF is funding another cohort of I-Corps™ L participants this summer. Another round of funding is possible next year as well. This is welcome news to researchers who are still testing the waters. Ed Berger, ENE associate professor, is one of those with an idea, but not quite ready to commit to the program.

“Its development is not ready for ‘prime time’ yet,” he says of his Engineering Genome video project. “Maybe another future cohort it would be a good candidate, but we have to get the development to the right place, first, and learn a little bit more about how the software works in practice. We need to let students actually use it before we’ll be able to productively go through the (I-Corps™ L) process.”

You can find more information about the NSF I-Corps™ program HERE and specific information about I-Corps™ L HERE.