Last year, Eden Badertscher received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps-Learning (ICorps-L) grant. What is ICorps-L? In brief, many of our funders—NSF, U.S. Department of Education, National Institutes of Health—find that they are not getting good return on their investments. When grants end, the work often sits on shelves. In response, the NSF and other funders are giving “Innovation Corps” grants that include intensive training and support to take innovations to scale and sustain the work. Here's a quick video specifically about the NSF's ICorps-L grant program:
As part of Eden's grant, Eden and Mary Wedow participated in a sort of “Innovation Corps Boot Camp,” which included conducting 100 interviews over 6 weeks. On December 21, from 12:15-1:00, Eden will share her lessons learned from this experience in a Brown Bag (RSVP to her if you haven't done so already). As a sort of "Coming Attractions" to the Brown Bag here are a few of her lessons learned. Feel free to add comments or questions to this document.
LESSONS LEARNED: CLIFF'S NOTES VERSION
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The “Lean LaunchPad” is combining two things: The Lean Start-up Model (entrepreneurial approach that focuses on learning through customer discovery and hypothesis testing…it really isn’t just for entrepreneurs) and the Launchpad which is an online platform we used to record and keep track of our business model canvas (BMC): https://www.launchpadcentral.com/ . This was the tool in which we had all our value propositions, customer segments, relationships, etc., that we tracked week to week as we conducted our interviews. You keep interview records in here too and they tie what you learn in your interviews to your various hypotheses. Overall It helps you to keep track of what you are learning, your pivots, etc., and you can go back through your historical BMC to see how you changed over time.
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There are many similarities between this and design thinking. Is ICorps-L something developed at EDC?
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The I-Corps Program is a much larger effort than EDC; I think our program was the first EDC program to go through it. The major funders (NIH, NSF, NASA, etc.,) as well as others are using ICorps as a way to help promote sustainability and scalability via entrepreneurial thinking, because overall they are not seeing good return on investments. They want to increase the impact of projects they fund and change the system in the not quite as near term. The idea of course is that this way of thinking starts to filter down to the beginning of projects, not at the end.
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Candace: I think that design thinking is really central to your work, is that right? What’s a recent project in which you applied it? And: This looks cool: http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/
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The thing about pivots is that you don’t realize them until well after they happen, and then what you do about them is another matter. We had a few big potential ones, and some for sure ones. One for example was that an entirely new customer segment became apparent for our work (in this case, teacher education programs looking for mentors); this one is still a potential because it will require a lot of strategy work. A big yet easy one was that we realized we needed to separate our PD and our Instrument for the purposes of the market. We saw them as one “program” if you will. They can still be connected, but in separating the pieces, we can meet a wider variety of customer needs.
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The range of projects really ran the gamut. There was one focused on performing equity audits; one focused on building a “Journal for Undergraduate Research”; one was focused on an app supporting place-based scienc; and one was focused on a platform to educate about child brain development. We had 21 different NSF projects represented in our cohort.
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