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Sustained innovation and economic strength of the U.S depends on a greater participation of underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). University-based outreach programs that serve African American and other minority populations should do more to infuse invention education in activities that engage pre-college students from these groups to motivate them to pursue STEM degrees. The Research, Discovery, and Innovation (RDI) Summer Institute is a design and science entrepreneurship program that is offered at North Carolina Central University to high school seniors who have been accepted for admission to a STEM degree program at the university. This study found the RDI Summer Institute program to be effective based on proximal outcomes of gains in composite entrepreneurial thinking skills (entrepreneurial, managerial, engineering design, and technical skills) as perceived by the participants and measured by pre- and post-surveys. Eighty-seven percent of the pre-college participants were African Americans, showed high levels of creativity and innovativeness, and presented product ideas that were conscientious in meeting their community needs. Program impact was assessed based on near-term and distal academic outcomes in college through a rigorously designed quasi-experiment which compared 31 case-control matched pairs of students who had been RDI participants and non-RDI participants. A conditional logistic regression showed first-year retention in STEM degree programs for students who had been RDI participants was five times that of students who had been non-RDI participants. Additionally, first-year STEM retention in differential comparisons favored female students, students from very low/low SES households, and students from single parent households. Also, students who had been RDI participants performed higher in STEM gatekeeper courses, and a strong positive impact of the RDI Summer Institute program was associated with higher STEM persistence even two and three years after pre-college students participated. 

Innovation is one of the most important drivers of economic growth, yet only 8% of minorities,12% of women, and < 0.05% of African Americans are recognized as innovators. However, acomprehensive analysis of nearly all doctoral dissertations from 1977 to 2015 shows that although individuals from under-represented minority groups demonstrated greater scientific innovation, their contributions are rarely further adopted compared to equally impactful contributions by majority groups. In this instance “rarely further adopted,” as noted by Hofstra et al. (1), means that the “novel contributions by gender and racial minorities are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities, and equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups.” Access to the wealth of potential innovations — going largely unnoticed and underutilized — from under-represented minority groups can be achieved, in part, by engaging science and engineering students, faculty, and staff at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in entrepreneurship through the use of the Innovation Corps (I-Corps) curriculum with adaptations to fit the education and research environments at HBCUs. A consortium of three North Carolina universities and the NYC Regional InnovationNetwork (NYCRIN) I-Corps Node established a partnership developing a specialized Lean LaunchPad training program for HBCU students, faculty, and staff. Implementation followeda three-step train-the-trainers ‘mentor-protege’ model, where new instructors ‘see one, do one, be one’ while learning to deliver the curriculum. The overarching goals of this initiativeare to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach in broadening participation in I-Corps and mainstreaming the innovation capacities of HBCUs. The authors include instructors from the collaborating institutions, who trained and served as the teaching team for regional and national cohorts. Included are the rationale for creating the program, partnership selection,instructor and team recruitment, best practices for the ‘mentor-protege’ model, and outcomes for the cohorts. This contribution is a unique opportunity for other faculty to learn from practitioners about the challenges and successes involved in creating such a new multi-institutional entrepreneurship training paradigm.