Lessons Learned from Innovation Corps-Learning Grant
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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:
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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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.
There are many similarities between this and design thinking. Is ICorps-L something developed at EDC?
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.
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/
LESSONS LEARNED: CLIFF'S NOTES VERSION
- Audience: You need to identify the primary audience/key “customer” up front and keep the intervention focused on that audience. You also need to talk to your audience before, during, and after you build a program or intervention. Often we think we know what our audiences want and think we are listening (and most often we are) but seeing it in writing and with data to back it up puts it in a different light. And once we listen, we need to make sure we do what they want, rather than what we thought they wanted.
- Value Proposition: It is essential to make sense of the value proposition for your work—product, service, etc.. The value proposition is not what you think is its value, but is about understanding what those in the field see as valuable about your work (very different than a description of your work). Identifying value propositions is a very businesslike term, but the idea still stands in building our type of programs/interventions. What is important to the key audience and why?
- Be Prepared to Pivot: Be willing to pivot when it makes sense and could lead to larger programmatic elements, but only when it fits with current needs and is not a total offshoot. Pivoting involves finding a match between what is needed/asked for (different from what you expected) and what you are doing. Big learning: If you haven’t done any pivoting of your program or initial ideas, you aren’t listening enough to your audience, or customers, or stakeholders.
- Market: Take a careful look at the total market and how potential clients (for example, school districts) can pay for this work (funding sources and making sure we tie to key funding). Often, this can mean helping clients see where they can pull the monies from in their budget.
- Flexible, But Firm: Consider how you can “automate” as much as possible. Yes, we need to be flexible and fit individual needs, but as we scale innovations we cannot treat each client as an individual project.The intervention/product/service needs to be 80%-90% final, including the technology for delivery, before we can move forward with a large group of clients. Figure out what 10-20% of the intervention/product/service is flexible and then routinize the system for getting the information that you need to do the customization. This is where entrepreneurship practices are critical, even if there isn’t a desire to be an entrepreneur.
- Start with Scalability and Sustainability: How you sustain and scale work cannot be an afterthought, but must be central to any program, and be funded as part of program. Putting something out in the market takes intensive, mindful effort and time that cannot be saved for after funding ends. This means product (vs. project) management needs to be built into a project from the beginning. Our funders, including NSF, want to see solid, strategic plans to scale and sustain work woven into our proposals. They are less interested in work that does not have plans to have real impact on field, and it is no longer acceptable for long-term government funding to be the strategy to get something out.
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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