Our Model  

Seed Grant Awards 

We collect real life bottleneck issues from our network of nonprofits, NGOs, foundations and collaborate with conducting research and developing solutions. We do this through our annual ‘Engineering Innovation for social impact’ Challenge. 

 

I2D Lab Flowchart Challenge to Entrepreneurship & R&D to Resources to Scalable Solutions

 

Preselection Round 

  • Representatives of the organizations share a problem statement that they would like us to help solve.
  • Shah Lab Steering Committee reviews the problem statements using established criteria.
  • The top problem statements are selected and the respective organization’s representatives are invited to join the Steering Committee. These problem statements are then circulated to College of Engineering faculty as Request for Proposal (RFP).
  • The Steering Committee discusses each submitted proposal and selects top three proposals for each problem statement. The feedback from the Committee is shared with the selected faculty to further develop their proposal for the final round.

Final selection for Seed Grant Awards 

  • Organizations representatives are invited to Purdue Campus to participate in the Shah Lab Expo. 
  • Selected faculty present their final proposal during the expo in front of the Steering Committee.  
  • The committee decides the winners of seed grant awards, that are announced during the reception. 

Co-Creating solutions and Knowledge sharing 

This is a year-round project, where we collect problem statements from industry stakeholders. We then match the problem to our faculty experts and create a team at Purdue that would work closely with our partner stakeholder to build a solution with them.  

If you are an NGO / Social Enterprise or an industry stakeholder and would want to partner with us in co-creating solution, please connect with us by filling out a short questionnaire and we will get back to you for further discussion.