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Nodes and Sites awardees in FY16 for funding in has been shown to address the gap between academic
FY17 (Table 3). Eight I-Corps Sites and one I-Corps research and successful commercialization through
Node were awarded $30,000 supplemental awards to customer discovery training, there are a number of
pilot novel approaches and partnerships that promote other critical factors that contribute towards getting
inclusive entrepreneurship through I-Corps. The a product to market. For example, understanding
pilot activities will engage differently-abled indi- how to engage investors, manufacture and scale tech-
viduals, first-generation college students, racial and nologies, acquire and manage intellectual property
ethnic minorities, and women, as well as Minority- protection, manage and run a business, navigate
Serving Institutions (33). This effort is just one of complicated regulatory environments, and develop
many approaches for generating insights to address strategic partnerships are all skills that would be
this complex challenge (34). of value to alumni of the I-Corps Teams program.
Other scaling challenges include managing the Therefore, NSF continues to consider how the pro-
consistency of the core I-Corps curriculum. Part of gram should evolve to address the “valley of death.”
the I-Corps program’s success has been the entre- Within its first five years, the I-Corps program has
preneurial nature of its development and execution. created opportunities to offer formal entrepreneurship
As attempts to mandate that the I-Corps program education to academic researchers, graduate students,
exist across all federal agencies, institutionalization and community members. Through I-Corps, lessons
may impact the entrepreneurial culture of the pro- have been learned about the many barriers to the
gram. Each federal agency has its own culture and successful translation of university technology. While
vocabulary for defining stakeholders and activities. I-Corps does not address all barriers, it does address
As I-Corps expands to other federal agencies, these two crucial ones—the education of researchers in
differences could potentially impact delivery of the relevance of customer needs in research and the
the curriculum as it is adopted for teams consist- development of an entrepreneurial mindset.
ing of SBIR companies and Main Street businesses.
Furthermore, mentor matching continues to be a ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
rate-limiting step for onboarding teams. NSF is cur- The authors thank Errol Arkilic, Babu DasGupta,
rently working to address these issues. Jonathan Fay, Keith McGreggor, Paul Freet, John
Looking to the future, the question remains, “What Bacon, Jerry Engel, Dedric Carter, Tom Peterson, and
dictates success for the I-Corps program?” Although Farnam Jahanian for sharing their experiences on the
the program was able to meet its original metrics launch of the I-Corps program and/or for reviewing
for implementation, the impact of its activities is
being evaluated with a longitudinal lens. Depending the manuscript. The authors would also like to thank
on the audience, be it from a congressional, aca- Steve Konsek, Anita La Salle, Lydia McClure, Don
demic, or federal laboratory perspective, different Millard, and Kesh Narayan at the NSF for sharing
metrics should be explored. For instance, from an their experiences, reading drafts of this manuscript,
economic development lens, stakeholders may be and for their support of this work. Aileen Huang-Saad
more concerned with start-up activity, such as levels is partially supported by NSF IIP-1643280.
of funding, density of resources, and number of jobs Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or rec-
created. However, from an academic perspective, ommendations expressed in this material are those
stakeholders may consider exploring impact on the of the author(s) alone and do not necessarily reflect
development of human capital, such as university the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF)
entrepreneurial culture as well as academic trainee or the American Association for the Advancement
and researcher perceptions of entrepreneurship and of Science (AAAS) or any other organization with
commercialization. Identifying stakeholders and the which the authors are affiliated.
appropriate metrics will continue to be debated as The following competing interests should be
the program continues. noted: 1) Drs. Nnakwe and Cooch served as AAAS
Internally, current evaluations suggest the need to Fellows for the NSF I-Corps™ program from 2015 to
enhance post-I-Corps training. Though the program 2017 and were involved with program administration,