I-Corps Node: Activating the Midwest I-Corps Network

Award ID: 1643280

This project by the University of Michigan I-Corps Node, one of the founding NSF I-Corps nodes, will expand the founding Node into a comprehensive regional node called I-Corps Midwest. I-Corps Midwest Node brings together the University of Michigan (UM) as the lead institution, and the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne, and Purdue University as partner institutions. This Node is uniquely suited to serve the Midwest entrepreneurial ecosystem by bridging rural communication gaps that typically lead to an uninformed commercial opportunity around research inventions, difficulty in retaining and accessing talent with sufficient breadth of specific and relevant expertise, and instilling customer discovery memory across I-Corps programs allowing entrepreneurial researchers to leverage learning from previous I-Corps teams. This project will create mechanisms to overcome the consequences of low ecosystem density by building on the existing partner university collaborations and create an active and cohesive network that leverages their collective commercialization pipeline, previous experiences, and connections. The Node will form a deeper understanding of the individual motivations and experiences of the faculty and students as they participate in I-Corps programs. This knowledge will help to continue driving culture change at these institutions and create the innovation human capital needed to move research ideas forward into the marketplace. The Node will create measurements of network activity and the resulting outcomes will provide information on which methodologies are effective and should be propagated to other regional clusters and the nation. This project builds on the previous four years of work by NSF to create collaborations that are critically important for institutions that are not located in entrepreneurially dense areas to reach and prepare individuals to compete on a national and international level.

NSF Program Director: Ruth Shuman