With nearly a dozen start-up companies under his belt, Mark C. Bates, a West Virginia University cardiologist, didn’t expect too many surprises from taking a course on entrepreneurship sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
One came, however, very early in the 10-week program. His three-member team had just finished outlining a surgical innovation—a tool for treating atrial fibrillation—when an instructor stepped forward with a blunt question. Curing chronic ailments might hurt doctors’ long-term revenues, the teacher said. So might doctors simply refuse to use the device?
It felt like “a kick in the gut,” Dr. Bates said, recalling the hushed moment in the conference room, which was filled with several dozen other scientists and corporate partners who were also taking the course, known as I-Corps.
I-Corps, or Innovation Corps, is the creation of Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur now affiliated with Stanford University. According to Mr. Blank, the hallowed academic norm of careful, contemplative reasoning is also the single biggest barrier to converting research discoveries into economically valuable enterprises.
So the course is designed as much to shock scientists out of their pensive habits as to provide them with actual educational value.
“It’s a secret psychological-warfare program to get scientists to think like entrepreneurs,” said Mr. Blank, a consulting associate professor of engineering at Stanford.
It seems to be working. Since the National Science Foundation began sponsoring I-Corps, in July 2011, more than 700 teams—typically consisting of a university researcher, a graduate student, and a business-world expert—have completed the course. The National Institutes of Health began sponsoring I-Corps classes this past summer, and several other federal suppliers of research money, including the Departments of Energy and of Agriculture and some intelligence agencies, have followed suit.
I-Corps is part of a growing determination among leaders in both government and higher education to find ways of extracting more economic value from the nation’s research enterprise.
Too often university researchers discover a “great technology, and it sits on the shelf not doing anybody any good,” said William K. Aulet, a senior lecturer in business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. I-Corps appears to be very helpful in solving that problem, Mr. Aulet said.
In fact, some entrepreneurial enthusiasts wonder if I-Corps might do too good a job of reorienting attitudes, eventually distracting scientists from the jobs they’re best equipped to perform.
Those concerned include Carl J. Schramm, a university professor at Syracuse University and former president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a leading sponsor of studies of entrepreneurship. Going too far with an I-Corps mentality might “establish a social force inside of science where people see their role as scientist/entrepreneur,” Mr. Schramm said. “That’s not been the historical model in America, and we have been the most productive nation in terms of our basic research model.”
Rattling Cages
The I-Corps instructor who raised for Dr. Bates’s team the possibility that profit motives may trump humanity, B. Keith McGreggor, is the head of the nation’s second-largest start-up incubator, the VentureLab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Asked afterward about his comment, Mr. McGreggor said he had only meant to be provocative.
Provocation is a running theme of the course. In their early weeks, the classes have a boot-camp feeling to them. Teams take turns standing in front of a room full of fellow students while instructors such as Mr. McGreggor repeatedly interrupt their PowerPoint presentations—demanding to know, among other things, why they hadn’t made more phone calls the previous day.
Phone calls are a central element of I-Corps. The course requires team members, over 10 weeks, to speak in person or by phone with at least 100 experts and potential buyers to find out whether their proposed innovations would actually find paying customers.
I-Corps instructors recognize that the number of phone calls they demand is a bit excessive, Mr. McGreggor said. And to some participants, the pressurized environment in class can seem over the top, too.
“I feel like I could get the same value out it without all of that stuff,” said William L. Plishker, an assistant research scientist in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park. “But I can also appreciate that there may be scientists and researchers in that room who do need their cage rattled.”
Throwing Rocks
That’s exactly the idea, said Mr. Blank. His books extolling the value of directly questioning potential customers—a cornerstone of the “lean start-up” model—became required reading in business-school classrooms long before I-Corps began spreading the gospel directly to faculty members.
“The notion of urgency and ambiguous decision making on insufficient data is the antithesis of the environment they’re in,” he said. “We’ve taught him"—the hypothetical researcher—"how to think in a very different way.”
Dr. Bates, a professor of medicine and surgery at West Virginia University, came to the class having already obtained about 60 patents and used them to start about 10 companies. Many of the I-Corps teachings involve lessons that he had to learn the hard way, he said. “I wish I had access to this 15 years ago,” Dr. Bates said. “It would have helped me a lot.”
His I-Corps team’s invention for treating atrial fibrillation is a pacemaker-like device that connects to a nerve in the neck known to regulate the heartbeat. Atrial fibrillation, sometimes called a-fib, is a common type of abnormal heartbeat that can cause pain, dizziness, and fatigue, as well as an increased risk of stroke or heart failure. Treatments with drugs don’t often last, and existing surgical options are limited.
There’s no question that doctors facing patients with atrial fibrillation want better options, Dr. Bates said. But by methodically contacting potential customers, as required by the I-Corps method, he and his team learned that doctors were not likely to see the device as having wider application for other types of heart patients, as the team had hoped. That’s important, Dr. Bates said, for giving both a theoretical company and its investors a more realistic expectation of the potential market.
Georgia Tech’s Mr. McGreggor said he didn’t really believe that cardiologists would reject the device if further testing showed that it actually worked. But, he said, researchers can often be surprised at how expected breakthroughs do not gain a foothold in the market.
He recalled an earlier class in which a group had developed a new type of bandage, made from a material that quickly stanches bleeding. The technology seemed sound, but nurses in emergency rooms weren’t especially interested. Instead, they wanted to buy bandages packed in boxes that opened more quickly.
That experience illustrates the danger researchers face when they fall too quickly in love with their inventions, Mr. McGreggor said. “That’s why I was throwing a rock at them,” he said of Dr. Bates’s team.
Hackers, Hustlers, and Hipsters
Mr. Blank helped form eight technology companies during his entrepreneurial career, though he never graduated from college. He laughs at the basic simplicity of building companies and economies just by teaching university researchers to question their potential buyers. The class “is so stupidly simple, it’s embarrassing,” he said. “But its impact, for stupidly simple, turns out to be huge.”
For some, perhaps, the program is too simple. At the undergraduate level, entrepreneurship courses regularly emphasize the lean start-up model, rather than the more laborious process of writing a detailed business plan, as the basis of a final student project.
Mr. Blank applauded that move. A business plan is largely useless, he said, if the entrepreneur hasn’t first identified his or her likely customers. But many entrepreneurship experts say the business-plan model remains important, especially for students whose careers take them to bigger, more-established companies.
Learning to call potential customers is “just a very small component of a very exhaustive project,” said John M. Torrens, a professor of entrepreneurial practice at Syracuse University.
That underscores the broader question, Syracuse’s Mr. Schramm said: How far should students and faculty members be pushed in this direction?
Universities are now essentially treating entrepreneurship as its own occupational category, with an estimated 6,000 entrepreneurship courses nationwide, he said. But it’s not clear that the country needs that many all-purpose entrepreneurs, Mr. Schramm said, or that it benefits when a skilled cardiologist such as Dr. Bates spends his time telephoning dozens of potential customers. “We’d be much better off having a cardiologist crack the problem of a-fib,” he said. And there’s evidence, Mr. Schramm said, that emphasizing commercial applications can influence what fields a scientist might even consider pursuing.
MIT, one of the world’s most successful universities for creating entrepreneurs, is among a couple of dozen I-Corps training sites nationwide. Its success, Mr. Aulet said, is very much a product of connecting teams of engineers, designers, and business leaders—"as we say, the hackers, the hustlers, and the hipsters.”
‘A Viable Profession’
Entrepreneurship is “now seen as a viable profession like being a doctor or teacher or lawyer,” he said. “And that’s just a cataclysmic change, which is why the demand for entrepreneurship education has gone through the roof.”
MIT tries to mitigate concerns of the type raised by Mr. Schramm by offering ethics courses that point to research objectives beyond the potential for financial reward. And, Mr. Blank said, I-Corps classes are provided only to researchers who already have federal grants. Program organizers have no ambitions to expand it any wider than that, he said.
Congress has asked that 3 percent of all federal research budgets be focused on commercialization, Mr. Blank said, and efforts to make that spending more efficient shouldn’t shift the overwhelming emphasis of agencies such as the NSF and the NIH away from basic research.
More than half of the NSF’s original group of 319 teams have started companies, said Don L. Millard, a program director at the NSF who helps coordinate the I-Corps portfolio. The agency is working to compare scientists who do not take the course with ones who do, to determine if I-Corps graduates are more likely to found companies or to save money by abandoning ideas that aren’t viable. The NSF also is looking to see if I-Corps changes how faculty members teach courses, he said.
It seems to be having some effect, program participants say, “We’ve always struggled with this idea of ‘Well, who’s the business person who’s going to work out all these issues for us?’” said Mr. Plishker, the University of Maryland scientist. “What’s been really nice about the I-Corps program is, well, it’s us: We’re going to work on the business issues, even if none of us have M.B.A.’s.
Correction (11/14/2014, 4:07 p.m.): This article originally misstated at one point William L. Plishker’s position at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is an assistant research scientist in electrical and computer engineering, not a professor. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
