Uncle Sam's New, $5M Incubator for Student EntrepreneursThe National Science Foundation wants to help commercialize students' university work so they can launch successful startups.
ByCarol Tice•
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A lot of great business ideas lurk in the halls and research labs of science and engineering schools at America's colleges and universities. Now, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has formed a public-private partnership that will put $5 million toward getting more ideas out of the research phase and launched as successful business startups.
Here are the details:
The NSF's new Innovation-Corps, or I-Corps, program plans toidentify 100 great research-stage ideasin the coming year and give each training, support services, mentoring and $50,000 toward commercialization. The program's goals: turn research into useful technology, encourage better collaboration between academia and industry and provide students more opportunities to learn about business basics.
The training program will be modeled after the groundbreakingLean LaunchPad coursetaught for the first time at Stanford last spring. The course emphasized rapid testing of multiple hypotheses about the business using ample market research to find the most viable business model quickly.
Stanford lecturer Steven Blank, who created the LaunchPad class, is among the instructors for a planned I-Corps training class scheduled for October to December at Stanford.
"This is apotential game changer for science and innovationin the United States," Blank wrote in a recent blog post. "And it will lead to more startups and job creation."
Private partners in the new program include theEwing Marion Kauffman Foundationand theDeshpande Foundation, which both seek to foster entrepreneurship.
There is a lot ofincubator activity on college campusesalready, and this new program may stimulate more private-sector programs.
对于那些对学习更感兴趣,美国国家科学基金会set up a website with the program information and is holdingmonthly information Webinarson first Tuesdays. At a time when the federal government has taken heat for bailing out big banks with billions while arguably giving small businesses short shrift, the formation of I-Corps seems like a small, but positive development.
What's your reaction to the new I-Corps incubator?Leave us a comment and tell us about it.
