ARLINGTON, Va -- A new public-private effort aimed atstrengthening the US "innovation ecosystem" seeks to leverage promisingtechnologies emerging from university labs so that they can quickly be turnedinto products.
The Innovation Corps is the National Science Foundation's(NSF) response to growing economic pressures to find new ways to leverageinvestments in basic research in science and engineering. NSF Director SubraSuresh spearheaded the launch of the "I-Corps" last July. Suresh is the formerdean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a hotbed fortechnology spinoffs.
Twenty one teams were selected last October for the firstround of I-Corps funding. They received relatively modest $50,000 awards tobegin assessing the commercial prospects of their technology concepts. Programmanagers said they are preparing to select individual projects that would bringtogether researchers and entrepreneurs to find new ways to transform emergingtechnologies into viable commercial products.
Candidate projects range from water purification systems andMEMS-based medical devices to single-crystal graphene films and hydrocarbonsensors.
I-Corps program manager Errol Arkilic called the initialawards "catalytic funding" that would bring together researchers andentrepreneurs to find new ways to "get stuff out of the lab" and intocommercial markets. The resulting innovation ecosystem also would allow leanentrepreneurs to quickly gauge commercial interest in their technologies.
The I-Corps approach relies heavily on principles developedby the lean startup movement championed by serial entrepreneurs like SteveBlank. Blank helped found eight Silicon Valley companies, including Zilog andMIPS Computers. NSF is seeking to leverage that model to establish a nimbleprogram with access to emerging technologies that could be quickly transformedinto prototype products. The next step, according to Arkilic, is determiningwhether "anybody cares about the product and whether you can deliver value."
NSF officials stressed that I-Corps also was created toidentify and commercialize "low-hanging fruit" at NSF-funded university labs.By subjecting researchers and their technologies to the rigors of commercialmarkets, program managers hope to seed an innovation ecosystem that might serveas a new engine of U.S. economic growth.
Indeed, economists see the US system of basic research asone of the few remaining US competitive advantages as innovation in areas likemanufacturing shift steadily to Asia, especially China. The US continues tolead in basic research and remains "the best place in the world if you have anidea and you want to make into a new product or new service," Dan Breznitz, aprofessor of international affairs at Georgia Tech, told a recent congressionalhearing on Chinese innovation. "What weare not good at is once any of those ideas actually involve production."
Precisely how new ideas generated in university labs can betransformed into new products and markets is one of the fundamental goals ofthe I-Corps program, organizers said. Arkilic stressed that I-Corps teamsconsisting of researchers, mentors from the VC industry and entrepreneurs willwork together to survey the competitive landscape for emerging technologies,determine the resources needed to bring promising technologies to market anddetermine what value a technology innovation can deliver to a particularmarket.
Among the well-heeled private sector members of the I-Corpsare the foundation created by venture capitalist and Sycamore Networks founderDesh Deshpande and the Kauffman Foundation, which among things funds UStechnology innovation programs.
See related video This story was originally published on EETimes.
