WASHINGTON — Discoveries in science can help meet the needs of certain societal needs, but entrepreneurs fill a big gap that exists between the laboratory and marketplace.
In 2011, the National Science Foundation started a program called Innovation Corps (I-Corps) to help scientists and engineers focus beyond the laboratory by partnering them up with established entrepreneurs.
“I-Corps was founded to leverage productive public-private partnerships and extend the impact of fundamental research discoveries,” said Subra Suresh, director of National Science Foundation at an event commemorating the first anniversary of I-Corps and highlighting the accomplishments of the nearly 100 teams that participated in the program.
The National Service Foundation assigned each of the participating teams with an entrepreneur with a background in their respective research fields to serve as mentors, and provide insights on transitioning technology for the marketplace.
This partnership between academia and enterprise has led some researchers to commercialize their research like Sophie Lebrecht, a post-doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University whose study was based on how the brain’s affective processing and decision-making systems react to visual perception of objects.
“Before this program, I never even heard of the word, ‘startup’,” said Lebrecht, who has met with Youtube to discuss her research and its by-product.
The guidance and connection with potential customers provided by the mentors allow the researchers to assess the needs of the market and adapt their innovation accordingly or even change course of their research.
A team from George Washington University entered the program with a business model based on providing location-based privacy services, but upon meeting with its prospective clients, it realized that there was no demand for the technology. In the end, the team pivoted to another technology it had already developed and came up with a product to provide real time data analysis to the intelligence community and hedge funds.
Working in a partnership with stakeholders such as a mentor and private companies posed a different kind of challenge for researchers like Stephen DiMagno, a chemistry professor at University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
“The program made me sweat everyday. People are expecting you to perform everyday,” said DiMagno about his participation in the program. “You’re out of your comfort zone all the time.”
The challenge of participating in the program has its rewards with the innovation possessing a more realistic and lucrative prospect in the marketplace.
DiMagno says that the last few patents that he has obtained with the program in the technology of efficiently synthesizing the radiotracers necessary for positron emission tomography (PET) are of commercial value unlike his earlier ones.
With two years remaining in its three-year pilot phase, and an even-larger budget, the I-Corps program plans to increase the participating teams to 200 this year.