The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Program was created to stimulate innovation and benefit society by training academic entrepreneurs to participate in technology commercialization and entrepreneurship. Defining outcomes and measuring the impact of a national initiative such as I-Corps is complex for many methodological and practical reasons. This study describes the I-Corps program structure and highlights the role that regional entities play in training and evaluation activities. Interviews with Node administrators highlight the diversity of approaches to evaluation activities and the existence of key evaluation challenges. They also offer insights into how these challenges could be overcome with more support and coordination nationally and across regional ecosystems.
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Training Faculty in Entrepreneurship and Innovation: An Evaluation of the National Science Foundation Innovation-Corps™ Program
Evaluating the impact of entrepreneurship education is difficult given the heterogeneity of programming which presents challenges related to the generalizability of findings. The National Science Foundation’s Innovation-Corps (I-Corps) program, which incentivizes academic researchers to explore the commercialization potential of their research, offers a unique opportunity to examine the outcomes of entrepreneurship and technology commercialization training from an educational perspective given its standardization across populations and settings. We used the four-level Kirkpatrick Model for evaluating the impact of training and education programs to examine faculty experiences with I-Corps in depth. Using a qualitative inquiry methodology, we conducted 26 interviews with faculty innovators across three large public research institutions. Findings revealed that faculty had positive impressions of the program overall and attributed specific knowledge gains to participation. They also described behavioral changes impacting both their research and teaching. However, participants also identified challenges with I-Corps pedagogy and identified opportunities to improve training. This program evaluation and description of specific learning outcomes (skills, knowledge, attitude, and behaviors) contributes to best practices associated with delivering technology commercialization and entrepreneurship training to academic researchers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1643280
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10195965
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy
- ISSN:
- 2515-1274
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 251512742092938
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/2515127420929383
