The University of Minnesota STEM Education Center has been awarded a $681,390 two-year grant from the National Science Foundation for the project “Workshop: I-Corps for Learning (I-Corps-L): A Pilot Initiative to Propagate & Scale Educational Innovations.” The I-Corps-L project is based on the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) model and will guide teams using established strategies for business start-ups, such as the Business Model Canvas and the Lean Launch Pad, to build entrepreneurial skills that will encourage mainstream application of their findings.
The project goal is to encourage an entrepreneurial mindset for academic research. Each of 10 teams is composed of an NSF-funded researcher with a project in undergraduate STEM education, an entrepreneurial lead, and a mentor.
“This project has the potential for achieving the elusive goal of educational transformation through propagation and scale of educational innovations,” says principal investigator Dr. Karl Smith, executive co-director of the STEM Education Center and an emeritus professor of civil engineering.
Project lead instructors are Dr. Smith; Dr. Ann McKenna, professor and chair of the Department of Engineering and Computing at Arizona State University; and Dr. Chris Swan, associate dean of undergraduate curriculum development at the School of Engineering at Tuft’s University. Co-instructors are Dr. James Barlow, Tuft’s University; Dr. Russell Korte, Colorado State University-Fort Collins; Drs. Shawn Jordan and Micah Lande, Arizona State University; and Robert MacNeal, Working Company. Each instructor brings a unique background in research, business, and STEM education. Lean Launch Pad developer Steve Blank and Jerome Engel, national faculty director for the NSF I-Corps programs are consultants. Brandy Nagel serves as the teaching assistant.
Other partners in the project include Dr. Rocio Chavela and colleagues at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), who are managing the I-Corps-L logistics, as well as Drs. Gary Lichtenstein and Cathleen Simons at Quality Evaluation Designs (QED) who are conducting the project evaluation.
See details on the award and project goals at the NSF website.