The National Science Foundation outlined plans on Wednesday to aggressively expand a program for teaching entrepreneurial skills to faculty members and graduate students, saying the initiative’s first year has shown it to be a cost-effective pathway to commercializing discoveries.
The program, called I-Corps, involves teaching scientists the basic skills of marketing their inventions. While it’s too early to reach definitive long-term conclusions about market-success rates, the first 100 projects have clearly built confidence, expertise, and enthusiasm among university participants, the program’s leaders said.
“The last year has been a phenomenal journey,” Subra Suresh, the foundation’s director, told an anniversary briefing at the NSF’s headquarters, in Arlington, Va. The program, which includes private investors, is designed to “get the biggest bang for the buck for the taxpayer investment,” Mr. Suresh said.
I-Corps reflects a growing push by the federal government, especially at a time of tight budgets and economic malaise, to show taxpayers the tangible benefits of the billions of public dollars spent on basic scientific research. A central objective involves finding better ways of “translating” basic scientific discoveries into commercially viable products and applications.
Through I-Corps, teams consisting of a tenured professor and a graduate student take a six-month course in the basic elements of entrepreneurship. As part of their education, each team is paired with a mentor from industry who gives advice as they contact potential customers to learn whether and how their discovery might have commercial interest.
Those taking the course so far have traveled to Stanford University, where the curriculum grew out of a course taught by Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who serves as a consulting associate professor of management. The participants attend a three-day session at Stanford, then return to their home universities with assignments that include talking to 100 potential customers over eight weeks. They then return to Stanford for a concluding course and evaluations.
As part of the first-year celebration on Wednesday, the NSF announced that the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the Georgia Institute of Technology were joining Stanford as the program’s core locations. As many as 10 more universities may join that list within another year.
Take-Home Lessons
The first-year students include Stephen G. DiMagno, a professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln who has invented a new generation of radioactive materials for use in the medical-imaging technique known as PET scans. Mr. DiMagno’s innovations allow such materials to be made more quickly, more reliably, and with higher yields.
“When we started the I-Corps program,” Mr. DiMagno said, “I didn’t really know what to expect because I had no business experience whatsoever.” He also described his experiences with several past inventions that seemed like good candidates for commercialization but didn’t make it to market.
“The most valuable take-home lesson for me from the program,” Mr. DiMagno said at the I-Corps anniversary event, “was that I was able to go out and talk to people and actually figure out what the difference is between having a wonderful technology and having a technology that actually turns into some kind of product.”
A major milestone in the government’s efforts to promote the commercialization of federally sponsored research came in 1980, with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act. That law allowed universities to control their inventions and other intellectual property that resulted from federal spending. Since then, Bayh-Dole has been credited with 5,000 new products, and at least $187-billion in economic activity from 1999 to 2007.
But advocates both inside and outside the government have suggested that even greater benefits are possible. The largest provider of federal money for basic scientific research, the National Institutes of Health, this year opened a new $575-million division, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, or Ncats, that is trying to eliminate bottlenecks in pharmaceutical development.
That new division is far larger than I-Corps, which is expected to cost about $10-million this year and about $20-million when expanded next year to about 200 projects. In part, that could reflect the different priority Congress places on biomedical research. The NIH has an annual budget of $31-billion, and the NSF gets only about $7-billion.
But the difference in cost and approaches also may reflect the economics of drug development, said Todd T. Sherer, associate vice president for research administration at Emory University, who now serves as president of the Association of University Technology Managers.
Because of the need for extensive testing, first on animals and then on human beings, new drugs can cost $1-billion to get through the necessary federal-approval processes, Mr. Sherer said. The Ncats approach involves paying researchers to find uses for compounds discovered by other scientists. Often those uses may not have been envisioned by the original discoverer.
Mixed Views in Congress
Yet the concept behind the I-Corps approach sounds promising, Mr. Sherer said. Not every researcher is destined to be an entrepreneur, but a basic understanding of markets can still be very valuable, he said. “We can make them better inventors just by giving them entrepreneurial training,” he said. “We don’t necessarily have to expect them to be company CEO’s.”
Mr. Blank, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur at Stanford, is more ambitious. He said he initially resisted the NSF’s suggestion that he accept life-sciences students into his program, having also heard the $1-billion figure cited by Mr. Sherer and agreeing it suggested the roadblocks to drug development were more about technical obstacles than marketing problems.
But he relented, and concluded that the $1-billion figure may be a fallacy. When scientists involved in drug development are also forced to do some of the marketing legwork themselves, Mr. Blank said, they often find out that the targets they had set weren’t necessarily their only options. There’s “no substitute for the researcher getting out and facing reality outside the lab,” he said.
The NIH appears to be among several federal agencies considering adopting the I-Corps approach, Mr. Blank said. An NIH spokeswoman said she could not comment on the program or its potential use by the agency.
Although it may be too early for I-Corps to demonstrate actual business success, Mr. Blank said surveys of his class show sharp increases among participants on a series of measures of their entrepreneurial skills.
And the program has an enthusiastic supporter in Rep. Daniel Lipinski, a Democrat of Illinois who regularly mentions it at meetings of the House Science Committee. Mr. Lipinski even persuaded the Republican House leadership to hold a subcommittee field hearing on the program last week in Chicago to tout its promise.
But the chairman of the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, Rep. Mo Brooks, a Republican of Alabama, made clear that he still wanted to see more evidence of the value of I-Corps. Mr. Brooks drew comparisons to solar-power companies, such as Solyndra and Abound Solar, that failed despite federal financing.
“At a time when businesses are struggling to compete with big government and funding is already scarce, and at a time when there are already a number of questions arising over the federal government picking commercial winners and losers,” Mr. Brooks told the hearing, “I need to better understand how and why NSF is best equipped to make these similar types of decisions for university research.”
