I-Corps Sites: Stony Brook University

Award ID: 1450404

This is a proposal to create an I-Corps Site at SUNY at Stony Brook. NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Sites are NSF-funded entities established at universities whose purpose is to nurture and support multiple, local teams to transition their technology concepts into the marketplace. Sites provide infrastructure, advice, resources, networking opportunities, training and modest funding to enable groups to transition their work into the marketplace or into becoming I-Corps Team applicants. I-Corps Sites also strengthen innovation locally and regionally and contribute to the National Innovation Network of mentors, researchers, entrepreneurs and investors. Stony Brook developed a suite of programs for providing science and engineering-based assistance to companies with technology needs. This suite of programs has been successful in fostering the growth of enterprises, including startups. The Stony Brook campus leads SUNY in technology transfer performance - invention disclosures, patent applications, issued patents, and executed licenses. Its economic development/ industry assistance programs, which assists companies of any size at any stage of development, has a track record of promoting company growth - more than 3,500 projects, completed with more than 800 companies, have generated more than $900 million in corporate revenues. The oldest and largest Stony Brook incubator has exited some 80 companies with a 55% success record. The Stony Brook I-Corps Site will capitalize on the prospective talent within its own faculty and student body and the discovery and innovation generated by sponsored investments in its research programs. Stony Brook's Site will collaborate with the University's academic leadership to focus assets on discovering and nurturing a new target, the entrepreneur, and structuring access to assets - including the Long Island REACH Hub - to maximize innovation impact and create a permanent, sustainable entrepreneurial pipeline as both beneficiary of and stimulus for a larger innovation network. As a region of 2.8M people with a $143B Gross Metropolitan Product (2012), Stony Brook's location, Long Island, is larger than 19 states and a net contributor to New York's fiscal health. Its growth rate, however, has lagged the nation since 2010. Strengthening the regional innovation ecosystem may have long-term positive economic impacts across the state. Within the ecosystem itself, the Stony Brook I-Corps Site will not only transform the culture of the Stony Brook campus, creating a permanent vehicle to feed the new venture pipeline, which will be strengthened by a synergistic relationship with the proposed Long Island REACH Hub, but it will also broaden the impact of the established NYCRIN I-Corps Node, in which Stony Brook is a partner, by feeding it close to an additional 100 entrepreneurial teams over a three-year period. Regionally, the design of the Stony Brook I-Corps Site will extend the Site's impact by inviting entrepreneurial researchers from the region's other research institutions to participate.

NSF Program Director: Ruth Shuman