Can a Focus on the Marketplace Help the Social Sciences Have an Impact?

Graduate students in a public-policy class at the University of Texas at Austin were mulling a serious problem in impoverished East Austin. Access to fresh food there is limited at best. They were already brainstorming possible solutions — food trucks? victory gardens? tax subsidies for grocery stores? — when their dean stopped them.

She prodded: Why not ask East Austin residents what would make their lives better? The students got a bit of a shock. Many of the people later told the students they weren’t chiefly worried about food; first they needed help finding good jobs and transportation.

“That, to them, was really an eye-opening experience,” said the dean, Angela M. Evans, a longtime congressional staffer who now heads the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Focused so heavily on the immediate question about food deserts, Ms. Evans said, the students didn’t put enough thought into big-picture needs.

The dean’s insight reflected an intellectual approach to applying research that’s gained currency in the last five years on hundreds of campuses nationwide. Broadly known as I-Corps, the process is a hard-charging, boot-camp style of intensive classroom experience in which researchers with promising innovations are aggressively pushed to seek the opinions of dozens of potential customers. They then draft bare-bones business plans and quickly assess the prospect of long-term success or failure.

The I-Corps curriculum began primarily as a means to teach those in lab-based sciences to more reliably convert their findings into marketable products. Backed in many instances by the National Science Foundation and then by a growing number of other federal funders, the method has been adapted for use by faculty members and students working in specialties that include health care, military strategy, civil engineering, and education services.

Now, in a test with potentially deep political implications, Ms. Evans is leading a group of social scientists to find out if a rigorous, consumer-oriented approach might help solve major societal troubles.

Early indications: It’s complicated. I-Corps strategies may help accelerate tasks such as enticing grocery stores to open in East Austin. It’s far less clear, however, how a curriculum that puts a premium on meeting customer demand will stop a problem like food deserts in low-income neighborhoods from recurring or persisting.

But Ms. Evans sees enough positive signs to keep moving ahead. After several years of development at the NSF’s urging, the LBJ School will begin an I-Corps-based curriculum in 2018. It’s envisioned as a six- to eight-week program, for students in the summer before they begin their graduate work, that introduces them to multidisciplinary problem-solving with a hard-science bent. “It’s not a panacea” for major societal problems, Ms. Evans said of the I-Corps approach. “It’s a disciplined way of thinking about how complex these things are.”

Yet even its prime funder has doubts about moving I-Corps into the social sciences. I-Corps is primarily an exercise in identifying the commercial potential of NSF-funded research, said Steven L. Konsek, a career technology-development specialist who became the NSF’s I-Corps program director in 2016, long after Ms. Evans received NSF grants to develop the idea.

“If people want to adapt the methodology for other uses, they can do that,” Mr. Konsek said, referring to the social sciences. “But that’s not I-Corps.”

An In-Your-Face Approach

I-Corps — the “I” stands for “innovation” — is largely the creation of Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur now affiliated with Stanford University. His basic model uses three-person teams composed of a researcher, a graduate student, and a mentor from the business community. More than a thousand such teams have competed in I-Corps training classes for a chance at a $50,000 grant to further develop an idea for commercial markets.

Many ideas that have won support certainly have social value. One I-Corps project, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, uses human lung tissue to determine the toxicity of air pollution. Another, at the University of Iowa, uses a natural compound found in a rare deep-sea sponge to create an anticancer drug. And an Ohio State University team is using satellites to monitor and protect freshwater resources.

But projects aimed explicitly at social challenges have proved trickier. One I-Corps spinoff, known as I-Corps-L, intends to help science teachers develop innovative curricula, tools, and classroom strategies. That’s still more about improving education by creating new products than by solving underlying social conditions. And even that much of a shift in the I-Corps model quickly hit snags.

At the first I-Corps-L class, in January 2014, the bulk of the teachers immediately rebelled against Mr. Blank’s in-your-face style — a classroom experience in which participants are repeatedly interrupted by instructors who demand faster progress. The I-Corps-L “students” were themselves teachers, and “they had a better sense of what pedagogical approaches may work and what’s most effective” than did the session’s leaders, said Christopher W. Swan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University who helped develop I-Corps-L.

I-Corps-L leaders softened the style for subsequent classes but kept the underlying emphasis on market value. As with their counterparts in the standard I-Corps classes, some education researchers embraced the philosophy while other chafed at the idea of thinking more like an entrepreneur than a scientist, Mr. Swan said.

After five rounds of classes over three years, I-Corps-L is now on pause, awaiting an NSF assessment of its effectiveness. For now, Mr. Swan said, the basic concepts of listening to others and questioning assumptions may be the most enduring value that I-Corps has given university researchers beyond those with a product to sell.

In his own field, the Texas native watched with frustration in recent weeks as Houston leaders dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Officials released water from two storm-stressed dams and intentionally flooded thousands of homes — ones that perhaps should never have been built — in a bid to avoid even greater destruction. Before he begins teaching his first-year civil-engineering students how to design a new bridge, Mr. Swan said, he asks them to consider something else first: Is the project really a good idea for the community?

Hard Economics

Spreading that approach is taking time, both inside and outside higher education. Engineers Without Borders USA, which sponsors life-saving engineering projects in developing countries, often with academic partners, has been working since 2014 to integrate I-Corps concepts into its training methods. Opening new offices and ensuring project quality, however, have taken priority, said Catherine A. Leslie, the group’s executive director, so the effort is still in progress.

And when social-improvement projects hit the usual obstacle — hard economics — solutions often aren’t readily evident. Barry J. Nalebuff, a professor of management at Yale University, had a huge financial success when he and a former student, Seth Goldman, anticipated consumer demand for less-sweet options in iced tea. Their company, Honest Tea, was eventually bought by Coca-Cola for tens of millions of dollars. But Mr. Nalebuff had a markedly different result with an idea to help protect homeowners from sudden drops in home value.

The idea, home-price insurance, won a grant, and Mr. Nalebuff worked with colleagues at Yale and New York Universities to test it in Syracuse, N.Y. Consumers, especially retirees who depend heavily on home value, liked it. But lenders and private-mortgage insurers saw no particular benefit to their own healthy business models, and blocked its widespread adoption. The effort, at least for now, is dead, Mr. Nalebuff said.

Stories like that, said Robert H. Lustig, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco, should teach social scientists a lesson: It’s important to make partners out of well-financed interests that might hinder or oppose them.

After years of treating obese children, Dr. Lustig took a broader look in a book setting out the science of how a series of societal ailments — such the opioid crisis, depression, and heart disease — all relate to the basic human thirst for pleasure.

He then began working to fight the sugar industry’s heavy promotion of its product. Rather than wage a more conventional public-relations campaign, Dr. Lustig concentrated on persuading banks and investors to see sugar and sugary products as bad long-term bets. His efforts have helped inform reports on the topic by major financial-advising firms, including Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.

Other societal challenges have roots even more entrenched in global political and financial systems. Along with food deserts, University of Texas public-policy students have examined the problems caused by payday lenders, who charge exorbitant interest rates. A favored solution involves attracting more conventional banks to neighborhoods like East Austin.

For now, Ms. Evans is keeping hopes modest. Success, she said, probably will be limited to graduate students’ gaining greater awareness of the roots of social problems and of the options for responding.

Just that sensitivity can be profound, said Jenny Knowles Morrison, a research fellow working with Ms. Evans on adapting I-Corps to the social sciences. Doctoral students can get so immersed in narrow thesis questions, Ms. Morrison said, that they often have “very limited contact” with the communities actually affected by their study topics.

“I may end up face down,” Ms. Evans said, looking ahead to the start of her I-Corps project next year. “But heck, I’m dean, and I have a chance to try something.”

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.