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In launching small businesses, particularly in advanced sectors like artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), or biotech, disadvantaged groups like low-income people encounter extra challenges in accessing funding and investment. While federal and private sector efforts are underway to support businesses owned by women and minorities, there is still much progress to be made in bridging the investment gap. The Small Business Administration (SBA 2013) started providing $3.5 billion annual support through its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, with a directive from the Small Business Act to prioritize women and underserved groups. Typically, PhD degrees at US institutions focus on preparing graduates for academic positions, while only 11% of STEM PhDs would successfully achieve tenure-track faculty positions. To foster innovation and increase the participation of underrepresented minorities in emerging industry startups and secure U.S. competitiveness in the global arena, the National Science Foundation (NSF) introduced the Innovative Postdoctoral Entrepreneurial Research Fellowship (IPERF) program managed by the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). The first evaluation of the IPERF program shows that one-third of the fellows who joined the STEM entrepreneurial program stayed either in their startups or joined other entrepreneurial fields. This seems to be an interesting indicator of the increased entrepreneurship interest of STEM postdoctoral fellows, especially if the vast majority of them represent underserved communities.
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Work-in-Progress: A Review of the Type, Breadth, and Limitations of Publicly Available Educational Technology Products in 2022
One of the major changes in the higher education ecosystem over the last decade has been a rise in the availability of education-based software products, including education-based web-pages and web-services. Globally the investment in education-based startups in 2017 was $9.5B which surged to $18.7B in 2019 [1]. The COVID-19 pandemic further fueled record investment in this sector, with the US seeing $2.2B invested in 130 startups in 2020, up from $1.7B in 2019 and $1.4B in 2018 (see [2] and [3]). Early indicators show that 2021 will again see further increases [4]. While the majority (92%) of these investments are aimed at consumer and corporate sectors, there is potential for the innovations developed to diffuse into both the P-12 and higher education spaces [5]. What is evident from the investment numbers is that an integration of learning technologies specifically into higher education is progressing at a relatively slower pace [5]. It is the goal of this work-in-progress to identify some of the reasons for this slower progress. Our hypothesis is that, while some of these reasons may be obvious, there are also more subtle and/or counterintuitive reasons for the reduced interest in higher education. The motivation and need for the proposed study grew out of an ongoing NSF RED project where we endeavor to fuse the concept of convergence, loosely defined as “deep integration,” into our undergraduate engineering curriculum. Increasingly software and data systems at colleges and universities, and the affordances they do and do not offer, are integral to university structures. If the respective software systems do not support certain activities and functions then the programs are simply not useful to the faculty [6]. Additionally, any subset of systems needs to seamlessly integrate to form a coherent and usable learning support system that faculty, students, and staff can use without issue and/or barrier. The goal of the proposed activity within our grant is, thus, to build structures to collect, analyze, and display data in support of developing skills in addressing convergent problems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2022271
- PAR ID:
- 10356583
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exhibition
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- #37421
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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