A three-year-old program at the National Science Foundation for teaching university-based researchers to become entrepreneurs is getting a huge new partner: the National Institutes of Health.
The program, known as Innovation Corps, or I-Corps, has spread to more than 100 universities since its establishment by the NSF and an entrepreneur and author, Steven G. Blank, at Stanford University in 2011.
The NIH, with a budget about four times the size of the NSF, now plans to try the idea “in a very small pilot type of way,” said Matthew E. Portnoy, an NIH official in charge of helping small businesses form partnerships with NIH-financed researchers.
The fundamental I-Corps learning model consists of three-person teams, often a faculty researcher and students, who together receive online and in-person instruction in the basics of entering the commercial marketplace.
Finding Partners
Mr. Blank, working from Stanford with the title of consulting associate professor of management science and engineering, has proselytized about the concept while traveling to campuses nationwide to set up versions of the program. He regales audiences with stories of how giving scientists simple insights into the basics of the business world have transformed their willingness and ability to market valuable ideas they have created.
But, speaking on Friday at an I-Corps conference here, barely a mile from NIH headquarters, Mr. Blank conceded he had experienced his own awakening. For years, he had insisted that the life sciences constituted the only field not amenable to his training strategies.
He was persuaded to reconsider by his admirers at the University of California at San Francisco, a leading medical-research institution. That led to Mr. Blank’s realization that I-Corps’ underlying principles would need to be specifically tailored for four main commercial divisions of life sciences—therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics, and digital health.
As an example, he said, the considerations most important in selling medical devices are intellectual-property rules, reimbursement systems, and regulatory strategy. In therapeutics, the bottom-line goal is to find a pharmaceutical-company partner within 18 months.
Getting Products to Market
For its part, the NIH has been eager to show more economic value from the science it finances. In 2011 it founded the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences with a goal of converting more scientific findings into commercial products.
The initial partnership with the NIH will involve up to 25 three-person teams, Mr. Blank said. Success will be measured by how many of the companies formed from NIH partnerships eventually get products to market, said the NIH’s Mr. Portnoy.
The program at the NIH also will provide an opportunity to teach faculty members and students who have not already formed a company—the original aim of the I-Corps program at the NSF. That will probably be accomplished by infusing Mr. Blank’s strategies into an existing NIH program to help researchers explore their commercialization options, he said.