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JAM ES NOB LE /G LOW I MAG ES A cademics, business experts, and government leaders all agree that innovation is the key to economic growth, but getting innovative ideas out of the laboratory and into the marketplace can be even more difficult than developing the ideas in the first place. In the U.S., the National Science Foundation (NSF) annually spends about US$7 billion to fund research in science and engineering—but that investment hasn't always led to the commercialization of new technology. To improve the success rate, in 2012 NSF began developing a network of universities that would teach business skills to teams that had won grant money from the agency. The Innovation Corps (I-Corps) began with two nodes, one at Georgia Tech and one at the University of Michigan. Early in 2013, the program expanded with three more nodes, each of which received roughly $3.7 million in funding. The Bay Area Regional I-Node program is a collaboration among the University of California Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and Stanford University; a node in the Washington, D.C., area includes the University of Maryland, George Washington University, and Virginia Tech; and a node in New York City features City University of New York, New York University, and Columbia University. NSF's goal is to create a closely linked network of universities that share ideas, training techniques, and best practices on how to commercialize ideas. It's not an easy target. "I heard someone from NSF say, 'The scientists we fund are very good at converting money into ideas. We need to get better at converting ideas into money,'" observes Rich Lyons, dean of UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Still, results over the first two years have been promising as I-Corps has adopted a systemwide approach known as "evidencebased entrepreneurship." While the I-Corps story involves many parts and many players, one way to take a closer look at it is to see how it's unfolding at Haas. Training the Teams The Haas School already had a commercialization program in place before it applied to be part of I-Corps, Lyons notes. At the same time, he and other school leaders had been considering how Haas could help the university get science to market more effectively. He says, "We knew we had a good geographic position for building an I-Corps node in Silicon Valley. We also had a lot of connective tissue already with Stanford and UCSF, so it wasn't hard to construct those relationships into the Bay Area I-Node." During the 2013–2014 academic year, that node will train 48 teams of NSF grant winners, half this fall and half next spring. The threeperson teams consist of the principal investigator, typically a tenured professor whose research has produced the new technology; the entrepreneurial lead, often a postdoctoral grad student with relevant technical knowledge; and a mentor, someone with business or entrepreneurial experience. NSF chooses the teams and also determines where and when they will take their seven-week I-Corps training. Those who attend the sessions at Berkeley will take a three-day workshop on campus, then spend five weeks staying in touch virtually. They return to campus for three days to finish the program. The Bay Area node is also conducting similar programming for regional entrepreneurs who don't have NSF grants but who have created new inventions they'd like to commercialize. "To find participants for those programs, we've sent announcements to California schools and national labs," says André Marquis, executive director of Haas' Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. "They don't need to have NSF or university affiliations—they just have to be teams balanced between people from tech and business backgrounds and have business ideas that are scalable." One of these additional sessions will take place at Berkeley; the other, which will focus specifically on healthcare, will be held at UCSF. "Business models in healthcare and hospitals are special," Marquis notes. "It's an experiment to see if we can add value by creating a special version for healthcare—we're planning one for clean energy as well." Regardless of who's taking the program, the curriculum remains similar, he says. "We teach scientists what a business model is and get them to a go/no-go decision. It's an educational program to teach basic startup triage." Staying Lean and Focused The key component of the I-Corps curriculum is the Lean LaunchPad system created by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, who has spent his retirement years writing books BizEd November/December 2013 31