U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

27–679PDF WASHINGTON : 2018

FROM LAB TO MARKET: 

A REVIEW OF NSF INNOVATION CORPS 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND 

TECHNOLOGY 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

DECEMBER 6, 2017 

Serial No. 115–40 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov 
(II) 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

HON. LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas, Chair 

FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma 

DANA ROHRABACHER, California 

MO BROOKS, Alabama 

RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois 

BILL POSEY, Florida 

THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky 

JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma 

RANDY K. WEBER, Texas 

STEPHEN KNIGHT, California 

BRIAN BABIN, Texas 

BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia 

BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia 

RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana 

DRAIN LAHOOD, Illinois 

DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida 

JIM BANKS, Indiana 

ANDY BIGGS, Arizona 

ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas 

NEAL P. DUNN, Florida 

CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana 

RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina 

EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas 

ZOE LOFGREN, California 

DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois 

SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon 

AMI BERA, California 

ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut 

MARC A. VEASEY, Texas 

DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia 

JACKY ROSEN, Nevada 

JERRY MCNERNEY, California 

ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado 

PAUL TONKO, New York 

BILL FOSTER, Illinois 

MARK TAKANO, California 

COLLEEN HANABUSA, Hawaii 

CHARLIE CRIST, Florida 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY

HON. BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia, Chair 

FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma 

RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois 

STEPHEN KNIGHT, California 

DARIN LAHOOD, Illinois 

RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana 

DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida 

JIM BANKS, Indiana 

ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas 

LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas 

DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois 

ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut 

JACKY ROSEN, Nevada 

SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon 

AMI BERA, California 

DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia 

EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

December 6, 2017 

Page 

Witness List ............................................................................................................. 2 

Hearing Charter ...................................................................................................... 3 

Opening Statements 

Statement by Representative Barbara Comstock, Chairwoman, Subcommittee 

on Research and Technology, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, 

U.S. House of Representatives ............................................................................ 4 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 5 

Statement by Representative Daniel Lipinski, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science, Space, and 

Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ....................................................... 7 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 9 

Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking Member, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives 11 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 12 

Witnesses: 

Dr. Dawn Tilbury, Assistant Director, Directorate for Engineering, National 

Science Foundation 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 14 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 16 

Mr. Steve Blank, Adjunct Professor, Management Science and Engineering, 

Stanford University 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 23 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 25 

Dr. Dean Chang, Associate Vice President, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 

University of Maryland; Lead Principal Investigator, DC I-Corps Regional 

Node 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 32 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 35 

Dr. Sue Carter, Professor, Department of Physics, Director, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development, University of California, Santa 

Cruz 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 39 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 42 

Discussion ................................................................................................................. 46 

Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions 

Dr. Dawn Tilbury, Assistant Director, Directorate for Engineering, National 

Science Foundation .............................................................................................. 62 

Dr. Dean Chang, Associate Vice President, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 

University of Maryland; Lead Principal Investigator, DC I-Corps Regional 

Node ...................................................................................................................... 67 

Dr. Dean Chang, Associate Vice President, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 

University of Maryland; Lead Principal Investigator, DC I-Corps Regional 

Node ...................................................................................................................... 68 
Page

IV 

Dr. Sue Carter, Professor, Department of Physics, Director, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development, University of California, Santa 

Cruz ....................................................................................................................... 69 
(1) 

FROM LAB TO MARKET: 

A REVIEW OF NSF INNOVATION CORPS 

Wednesday, December 6, 2017 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY, 

Washington, D.C. 

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:07 a.m., in Room 

2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Barbara Comstock [Chairwoman of the Subcommittee] presiding. 
2 

From Lab to Mtltket: 

Mr. Steve Blank, 

Stanford University 

Dr. Dean Associate 

University of Maryland; Lead 

Node 

Dr. Sue Carter, Pn'f"'''""'r, 

Innovation 

Cmz 
3 

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

COMMITTEE ON AND TECHNOLOGY 

HEARING CHARTER 

FROM: 

SUB.JECT: Research and Technology 

"From Lab A 

The Subcommittee on Research 

Technology will hold a hearing 

Corps on Wednesday, December 2017 

Office Building. 

Hearing Purpose: 

The purpose of the hearing is to 

Corps (I-Corps) and goal 

research from to market, to examine 

recommendations for ofi-Corps 

Witness List 

" Dr. Dawn Tilbury, 

Foundation 

2017 

Technology 

Science 

" Mr. Steve Blank, Adjunct Prc•t"'""' !Vl<mdg<:In<:JH 

• Dr. Dean Chang, Assoctare 

of Maryland; Lead Principalmv·estuza.tor. 

" Dr. Sue Carter, Professor. Department 

Entrepreneurial Development, un1vt:rsuv 

Staff Contact 

For questions related to 

202-225-6371. 

hearing, 

[nnovation and Entrepreneurship, 

Regional Node 

Center Innovation 

Cruz 

Jcnn 
4 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. The Committee on Science, Space, and 

Technology will come to order. Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare recesses of the Committee at any time. 

Good morning, and welcome to today’s hearing entitled ‘‘From 

Lab to Market: A Review of NSF Innovation Corps,’’ I–Corps. I now 

recognize myself for five minutes for an opening statement. 

The purpose of today’s hearing is to review the National Science 

Foundation’s I–Corps program and its goals of preparing scientists 

and engineers to extend their research from lab to market. The 

hearing will examine the successes and challenges of the I–Corps 

program, and the Committee will hear recommendations for the future of I–Corps and its role in the innovation ecosystem. 

In research labs today are the seeds for breakthroughs in new 

fields like quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and bioengineering, breakthroughs that will continue to transform our 

lives and the world we live in. Many scientists and engineers are 

not trained for commercializing those ideas because most did not 

go to business school or take any business development classes as 

part of their training. So how do we give them the tools to be successful entrepreneurs? How do we help scientists and engineers 

turn their innovations into products and services? 

In 2011, NSF established I–Corps to help fill that need. I–Corps 

is a National Innovation Network of eight nodes across the country, 

which connect academic researchers with the private sector and 

trains them to be entrepreneurs. NSF funds teams of researchers 

to go through a seven-week I–Corps curriculum that provides a 

real-world, hands-on, immersive learning experience. Today, I– 

Corps is taught at 86 colleges and universities in the United 

States, and over 1,000 teams have been through the program. 

I welcome Dr. Dawn Tilbury, the new Assistant Director for Engineering at NSF, to discuss what NSF has learned from over five 

years of running the program and collecting data and information. 

We are also fortunate to have Mr. Steve Blank on the panel, the 

architect of the NSF I–Corps curriculum. He will explain how his 

approach trains scientists and engineers to be entrepreneurs in a 

short period of time, and his vision for the future of I–Corps. 

We also have on the panel Dr. Dean Chang from the DC. Area 

I–Corps node to discuss the innovation ecosystem in the Virginia, 

Maryland, and DC. region. The 10th District—the 10th Congressional District which I represent has a robust and growing technology sector, while Virginia, D.C., and Maryland boast some of the 

top research universities in the country. I look forward to learning 

how I–Corps contributes to building connections between academic 

researchers and the private sector to create more companies and 

more jobs. 

Finally, I look forward to hearing from Dr. Sue Carter on her experience participating in three I–Corps teams and creating successful companies. 

Through research and activities like I–Corps supported by NSF, 

we have the opportunity to boost our economy, enhance our national security, strengthen our cybersecurity infrastructure, and 

create a STEM-job-ready workforce, not a small task, and we appreciate your role in all of that. 

[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Comstock follows:] 
5 

For Immediate Release 

December 6, 2017 

s 

Chairwoman Comstock: purpose 

Science Foundation's Innovation 

scientists and engineers to extend 

Media McDonald. Brandon 

1202) 

National 

preparing 

The hearing will examine the successes challenges of the 1-Corps program and 

!he committee will hear mr·nrnrrlPr>rir,trrm< for the future of !-Corps and its role in the 

innovation ecosystem. 

In research labs today are the seeds breakthroughs in new fields like quantum 

computing, artificial and hirlC>'lr<inC>C>rinn breakthroughs that will continue 

to transform our lives and 

Many scientists and engineers are not trained for rnrY>rn<>rri.r.li7i those ideas 

because most did not go to business school or Jake 

as part of their training. So how do 

entrepreneurs? 

How do we help scientists 

services? 

engineers their innovations into products 

In 2011, NSF established 1-Corps to fill that need. 1-Corps is a National innovation 

Network of eight nodes across country, which connects academic researchers 

with the private sector and be entrepreneurs. 

NSF funds teams of researchers to !-Corps curriculum that 

Today, 1-Corps is taught at 86 universities in the United States, and over 

,000 teams have been through program. I welcome Dr. Tilbury, the new 

Assistant Director for Engineering at NSF, to discuss what NSF has learned from over five 

years of running the program collecting data and information. 
6 

are also fortunate to have Mr. Steve Blank on the paneL the architect of the NSF 1-

Corps curriculum. He will explain how his approach trains scientists and engineers to 

entrepreneurs in a short period of and his vision for future of !-Corps. 

We also have on the panel Dr. Dean from DC Area !-Corps node to discuss 

the innovation ecosystem in the Virginia. Maryland and D.C. region. 

The 1Oth Congressional District I robust and growing technology sector, 

while D.C. and Maryland boast some the top research universities in the 

country. I forward to learning 1-Corps contributes to building connections 

between academic researchers sector to create more companies 

and more jobs. 

Finally, look forward to 

three !-Corps teams and ""'rn1nr1 

Through research activities like supported by the National Science 

Foundation. we have the opportunity to boost our enhance our national 

security, strengthen our cybersecurity and create a STEM-job ready 

workforce. 
7 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. And I now recognize the Ranking Member, the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Lipinski, for his opening 

statement. 

Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock, for—and 

Chairman Smith for holding this hearing. It’s a hearing that I have 

been wanting to have for a number of years. I’m glad that we’ve 

got here. And as everyone knows, I’ve spent a lot of time on this 

committee talking about the Innovation Corps or I–Corps, so I’m 

very pleased to be holding this hearing, the first one we had since 

we had a field hearing in Chicago back in 2012 on I–Corps. 

I’d like to think the 2012 hearing helped to win over some of my 

more skeptical colleagues at that time. The program was in infancy 

back then in the summer of 2012, having been launched by NSF 

in 2011. Now, we are seven years in and the program has not just 

grown and expanded at NSF, it has been adopted and adapted by 

several other agencies including NIH, DOE, and even DOD. 

While I help to build support in Congress to see I–Corps funded 

and expanded, agency, university, and national lab leaders alike 

embraced the potential and worked hard to implement it as effectively as possible. As a result, we are starting to see exactly the 

kind of outcomes that we hoped for back in 2012. Over 1,000 companies have completed a national I–Corps course, and we’re seeing 

many of the alumni go on to start successful businesses. 

There are some notable research institutions who started creating a culture of entrepreneurship decades ago such as MIT and 

Stanford. There are many more universities both public and private that have actively sought to learn from and implement many 

of the best practices from those pioneering universities. Unfortunately, many of them have had a hard time securing the funding 

and the right expertise to successfully undertake these efforts. 

There are also some institutions of higher learning that have simply not made this a priority. We know that institutional culture is 

a hard thing to overcome. 

Our world-class research institutions around the Nation excel at 

conducting cutting-edge research and educating the next generation of scientists and engineers. There is fear among some that promoting entrepreneurship would compromise the important basic research mission of the institutions. I believe there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. It is clear that students and faculty across 

the country are eager to see the research breakthroughs further developed into commercial products and processes for the benefit of 

society and our economy. 

In addition, because we now graduate far more Ph.D.’s than we 

have faculty jobs, entrepreneurship provides a viable career option 

for the more than 50 percent of Ph.D.’s who will not be able to pursue academic careers. 

With a very modest investment, I–Corps helps address the lack 

of funding from the private sector to develop entrepreneurial capacity at institutions of all sizes and types. It also helps to strengthen 

the SBIR program, shift institutional culture, and ultimately pay 

the American taxpayers back many times over in the form of commercialized products that would otherwise collected dust on a laboratory shelf. 
8 

By the end of an I–Corps course, participants make the go/no-go 

decision. Those that decide to go or to start a company have some 

market research to back up their decision. And those that either 

pivot to a new idea or choose no-go save themselves the effort of 

starting a company that would have been likely to fail. 

Just a few examples of companies that have developed from 

teams that participated in I–Corps training at the University of 

Chicago in recent years are Conduit, a company that speeds up the 

development and improves the quality of software for Internet of 

Things devices; Qualia Health, which makes a health assessment 

and monitoring app; and ClostraBio, which is developing therapeutics to combat food allergies. These companies are all making 

very real contributions to our economy, job market, and well-being, 

and these are only from one site out of many around the country. 

I remain a committed champion of this program and never cease 

to be amazed by how successful it has been and continues to be, 

but we can’t rely on past successes to keep I–Corps strong into the 

future, so I plan to introduce new legislation very soon to expand 

upon the I–Corps authorities already in law. My bill, the 

Innovators to Entrepreneurs Act, will open up I–Corps courses to 

participation by many more entrepreneurs than are currently taking advantage of them. Currently, the nodes that teach these 

courses are operating below capacity, which is a missed opportunity 

both for their faculty and for the companies that could be taking 

advantage of their training. My bill will also direct NSF to offer a 

new course that goes beyond the current I–Corps curriculum to 

focus on how to attract investors and grow a business. 

Since 2011, we have learned that the I–Corps curriculum does a 

great job of teaching aspiring entrepreneurs how to do customer 

discovery and vet their ideas, but once they decide to start a company and begin the commercialization process, it doesn’t teach 

them how to take the next steps like how to develop financial projections and build a winning team. 

Some of the same visionaries who developed the current I–Corps 

curriculum recognize this need and developed a new pilot course 

they’ve been calling I–Corps Go. The results so far have been promising, and demand for this type of training is high. Therefore, my 

bill directs NSF to develop I–Corps Go into an official I–Corps 

course and to offer it nationally to interested companies through 

the nodes that offer the current curriculum. I hope my colleagues 

will take a look at my bill and agree to cosponsor it. 

I also want to make sure that I mention the great job that NSF 

has done with I–Corps over these years and the work that they 

continue to do, and I want to welcome Dr. Tilbury in as leading the 

Engineering Directorate, so it’s good to have you there at NSF in 

this position. I look forward to our discussion and yield back. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Lipinski follows:] 
9 

I'd to think the 

priority. 

OPENING STATEMENT 

Ranking Member Daniel Lipinski (D-lL) 

ofthe Subcommittee on Research ami Technology 

Institutional culture is hard thing to ov•ercom,e. 

excel at conducting cutting edge research tmd educating 

There is a fear among some that nrrrmt1tirrv entreoJ·enclU•shio 

research mission ofthcse instillttions. 

clear that students and facnlty across the 

developed into commercial products and 

addition, because now 

viable career option for 
10 

combat food 

market, and W<~ll-bem;:. 

to 
11 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. And I now recognize Ms. 

Johnson for her opening statement. 

Ms. JOHNSON. Thank you very much, Chairwoman Comstock, 

and good morning. I appreciate you holding for this hearing, and 

thank you for the expert witnesses for being here this morning to 

share their insights with us. 

The research carried out at our nation’s universities and national 

laboratories creates the foundation upon which our entire innovation economy is built. However, in order to benefit society, the 

science must find a way out of the laboratory. These societal benefits may be varied. Science itself across all fields serves as inspiration for the public and a tool for educating the next generation of 

scientists and engineers. 

Science can also be used to strengthen our national security or 

to inform better and more effective policies for the public good. 

However, sometimes a scientific development holds the promise of 

new commercial products or process and that is where the National 

Science Foundation Innovation Corps, or I–Corps, programs have 

the biggest role to play. 

Unfortunately, the path from the laboratory to the market has 

rarely been smooth or easy. While the challenges are sometimes 

technical, they often are cultural and financial. Scientists and engineers trained to be academics speak a very different language than 

business people. Too often, as we will hear in today’s testimony, 

this leads to researchers spending extensive time and money developing technologies that nobody wants to buy. Even when the idea 

has a well-defined customer, the private sector may be unwilling to 

invest until the concept is more fully developed. 

Over the last several years, the National Science Foundation has 

been a leader in addressing the cultural barriers impeding commercialization while also making small investments in the proof-of-concept work. The I–Corps program stands out as an example of the 

excellent return we can achieve on a modest investment when we 

implement and scale-up proven practices. 

The—when NSF launched I–Corps in 2011, some of my colleagues were skeptical about the need or the appropriateness of 

having this program at NSF. Many in the university community 

were concerned that the program might harm NSF’s core research 

mission. I believe there has been a sea change in the response from 

the university community that reflects the pent-up demand from 

researchers, the dedication of NSF staff, and the clear benefits of 

this program. So as a result, this is one little program that may 

be helping to transform the entrepreneurial culture at universities 

well beyond their initial expectations. 

I hope my colleagues also see the benefit of this program and remain committed to supporting it, and I hope my colleagues also remain committed to supporting the long-term foundation of U.S. 

science and technology by continuing to invest in our research 

agencies, including NSF. I look forward to today’s discussion, and 

I yield back the balance of my time. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:] 
12 

built However, in 

NSF. 

!look to 

Ranking 

of my 
13 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. I’ll now introduce our witnesses today. Our first witness is Dr. Dawn Tilbury, Assistant Director for the Directorate for Engineering at NSF. She joined NSF 

in June while maintaining her appointment as professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan. A professor at Michigan since 1995, her research interest is 

in the area of control systems, including applications to robotics 

and manufacturing systems. She received a Bachelor’s of Science 

degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, 

as well as a Master’s of Science and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering 

and Computer Sciences from the University of California Berkeley. 

Mr. Steve Blank, I now recognize Mr. Lipinski to introduce his— 

this witness. 

Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you. Steve Blank is an adjunct professor at 

Stanford University, a lecturer at the University of California at 

Berkeley, and a senior fellow at Columbia University, but he is perhaps better known as one of the godfathers of Silicon Valley for his 

prolific blog and books on innovation, entrepreneurialism, and how 

to run a startup, including The Four Steps to the Epiphany and 

The Startup Owner’s Manual. Going back a second to the blog 

SteveBlank.com, I recommend The Secret History of Silicon Valley 

for everyone to take a look at the role that the government played 

in really creating Silicon Valley that a lot of people don’t know 

about. 

Steve has won numerous awards, including honors for his teaching at Stanford and Berkeley and appears on a Thinkers50 list of 

the world’s top management thinkers for several years running. 

Steve helped develop I–Corps, drawing on the principles of the 

Lean Startup movement, which he helped launch in Silicon Valley. 

He has since started other innovation and entrepreneurship programs, including Hacking for Defense, which was federally authorized in fiscal year 2018 NDAA bill and works to solve urgent problems for the Department of Defense and intelligence community. 

Through his work with the armed services intelligence agencies 

he has helped advance the concept of dual-use products, those that 

may be developed for defense applications but can also be sold commercially and attract private capital. 

Steve hails from Pescadero, California. It’s good to have him here 

today. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. 

And now our next witness is Dr. Dean Chang, Associate Vice 

President for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of 

Maryland and Lead Principal Investigator of DC. I–Corps. 

Prior to joining UMD, Dr. Chang spent 15 years in Silicon Valley 

where he served as the Chief Technology Officer of Immersion Corporation. He holds over 40 U.S. and international patents. 

Dr. Chang earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, a Master’s in Business Administration from the 

Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. 

in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford. 

Dr. Sue Carter is our final witness, and she is professor of physics and Director of the Center for entrepreneurship at the University of California Santa Cruz. She also serves as the Director of the 

NSF I–Corps site in Santa Cruz. 
14 

Previously, she worked as a research staff member at several 

companies and served as the Chief Technical Advisor and scientific 

founder at four startups. Dr. Carter holds six patents and one patent pending. Her research focuses on film technologies, biosensors, 

solar energy, and agriculture technology. 

Dr. Carter earned a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics, Chemistry, 

and Physics from Kalamazoo College and a Ph.D. in Chemistry 

from the University of Chicago. 

I now recognize Dr. Tilbury for five minutes to present her testimony. 

TESTIMONY OF DR. DAWN TILBURY, 

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, 

DIRECTORATE FOR ENGINEERING, 

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Dr. TILBURY. Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski, 

and Ranking Member Johnson, Members of the Subcommittee, 

thank you for inviting me to participate in today’s hearing on the 

National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps or I–Corps. My 

name is Dawn Tilbury, and as mentioned, I’m the Assistant Director for Engineering at NSF. 

The NSF I–Corps program started through the convergence of 

several trends in the economy in the understanding of startup formation and through NSF’s experience with seeding startups 

through the SBIR and STTR programs. 

I–Corps was adapted from Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad course 

at Stanford University. Steve’s course provided Lean Startup training to NSF scientists and engineers so they could quickly determine whether their technology or product had commercial potential. I’m very pleased to see Steve here today. Thank you for your 

leadership and support of this important program. 

I’m also pleased to see Dr. Dean Chang from the University of 

Maryland, D.C., and Virginia node and Dr. Sue Carter from the 

University of California Santa Cruz. You’ll hear from them shortly. 

The purpose of I–Corps is to accelerate U.S. innovation. It 

leverages results from fundamental science and engineering research into translational activities of potential commercial and societal benefit. I–Corps helps scientists and engineers gain entrepreneurial skills and identify valuable product opportunities that can 

emerge from academic research. 

Each I–Corps team has a technical lead, an entrepreneurial lead, 

and an I–Corps mentor. During their intensive training, the I– 

Corps teams determine whether they have a viable product or service with a fit in the market. At the end of the training, if the answer is yes, teams have a clear understanding of the next steps to 

move their technology into the marketplace. Those steps could be 

to pursue licensing their technology or to launch a startup. 

By addressing the challenges inherent to the early stages of the 

innovation process, NSF investments strategically strengthen the 

innovation ecosystem in the United States. To help accomplish this, 

we draw on many partners in that ecosystem. Academic institutions play a critical role in I–Corps, as does the private sector. 

Technology developers, business leaders, venture capitalists, and 

experienced entrepreneurs serve as mentors, sharing their knowl-
15 

edge and expertise with the I–Corps teams. This network enhances 

the ability of NSF-supported researchers and their students to turn 

scientific results into potentially successful technologies. 

Since our first cohort of 21 teams in 2011, the program has expanded across the country. I–Corps now has eight regional nodes 

involving 28 universities and 86 sites that provide infrastructure, 

resources, networking, and training to move scientific discoveries 

from university labs into the marketplace. The I–Corps model has 

been adopted by nine other federal agencies and the State of Ohio. 

The national I–Corps curriculum has trained more than 1,000 

teams to date. More than 450 of these NSF I–Corps teams have 

created startups. 

Although I–Corps constitutes far less than one percent of the 

NSF annual budget, recent data shows that I–Corps teams have 

collectively raised over $250 million in seed capital. For the team 

members, it has been truly transformational to think in a more entrepreneurial way. 

I–Corps is a way to unlock the economic potential of creative 

ideas in American colleges and universities generated by NSF investments. To lay the groundwork for future expansion, NSF has 

two pilot programs underway. First, we are funding eight I–Corps 

sites to increase participation and promote inclusion of underrepresented populations in entrepreneurship. These sites will pilot 

novel approaches and partnerships to engage differently abled individuals, first-generation college students, racial and ethnic minorities, and women, as well as minorities-serving institutions. 

Second, in collaboration with the NSF, SBIR, and STTR programs, we launched the I–Corps for Phase Zero pilot. This pilot 

supports nonacademic teams that are developing game-changing 

technologies. The Phase Zero teams receive national I–Corps training and participate in a follow-on curriculum called I–Corps Go 

that addresses some of the more common issues in startup formation. 

As we look to I–Corps’ next five years, we see continued urgency 

and motivation for the program. Several studies suggest that U.S. 

startup rates have not fully recovered from the Great Recession. 

With NSF-supported researchers continually creating and developing cutting-edge technology, we see the I–Corps program as a 

key tool to help with our broader goals to increase American innovation. 

Thank you for your interest in this program and for giving me 

the opportunity to speak. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Tilbury follows:] 
16 

Hearing 

Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking 

Subcommittee, thank you for 

Science Foundation's (NSF's) 

am Assistant Director for Engineering 

The NSF I-Corps 

the 

in the of startup tn,•m•>tutn 

through the Small Business 

(SBIR/STTR) programs. 

These trends resonated 

startups in the SBIR/STTR nn,.,r:,ms. 

edge, state of the art deep tec:hnn!<lgres, 

market failure, not technical failure 

to try something new that might 

lab to the 

the backdrop ofthe Great Recession, 

formation at the same 

ro;ntriihntM to net new jobs. A decline 

a worrying trend. 

about what practices 

generating static, multiyear business 

1 

Innovation 

emerged body of 

Uf(lbabilitv of §):f\rtup success. Instead of 

of startups as a for 
17 

business modeL Active customer discovery can guide this search and a framework to 

communicate it to the company, investors and stakeholders. 

!-Corps was developed and Launch Pad course Stantord 

University, with the goal Startup to NSF scientists and engineers so 

they could quickly determine whether their ""'""v"'OJ or product has commercial potentiaL 

Each real-world, hands-on, 

emnrr•"w""' opportunity around the 

se>·en·W(~eK program that involves 

online curriculum, inLeamed are both held on-site at the 

instructors and other teams in 

of the program 

product-market Ht and the wider 

business modeL At the end of the cmTieulum, Teams to have pertonncd at least one 

hundred (100) face-to-face interviews with customers and potential partners from their 

target markct(s). The progress in customer will be shared with 

cohort facilitate group 

Teams that come to "Go" decision the the program have been deemed have 

significant commercial viability. Of equal benefit the teams that get to a "No Go" decision 

end of the curriculum, who recognize their not addressing market needs 

perhaps needed additional development at the being considered for 

out We wanted to stop the something nobody 

NSF I-Corps is managed within NSF's ENG Directorate Division ofindustrial Innovation 

Partnerships (HP), but is an agency-wide seen over 450 companies develop 

out ofi-Corps teams. These companies raised $250 million in seed 

capitaL Traditionally, these 5-l 0 

successes. Early fimdraising and uuu!\.>vcu 

testament to I-Corps' value in improving stage startups. 

Another, often overlooked, outcome of I-Corps 

only seven weeks that their cutting-edge technology 

2 

opjporturtity cost of teams that decide after 

be wrapped into a viable 
18 

model and so do not start a company. Failing is the mantra of Silicon Valley and a tenet of 

l-Corps. As much as we relish the successes emerging from l-Corps, we applaud the 

teams that declare "No Go" in the to either adapt their technology or 

back at the or to pursue another innovation altogether. NSF has 

programs, such as the Partnerships for ltmovation (PFI), that are well suited to 

support that needs additional time snpport at the university prior 

commercialization. Similarly, the NSF SBTR/STTR program focused primarily supporting 

deep startups, many of whom the from l-Corps 

!-Corps has its in many ofthe long-standing innovation ec•Js\rst<~m 

programs. Those existing NSF innovation research alliances include consortia 

Engineering Research Centers (ERC), Industry Research Centers 

(JUCRC), PFI, Science and rechnc>lo~;y 

Centers (NSEC) and Materials arc 

also exemplified by the Grant Opportunities for fi\CawcmJ" 

and the SBIR/STTR program. Many of these 

inv"<t'm<>1nt portfolio for decades. For SBIR 

the NSF in 1976. These programs complement our other 

scientific and engineering research multiple pa1thvva)rs 

innovative technologies. 

Most closely related to I-Cm11s is 

in FY 20 ll. The PFI program: 

the Division of UP which also started 

" the translation 

ms:cover·ws made NSF r<>seaJ·cn•~rs. 

entrepreneurial 

• fosters connections between alliances. 

innovation ecosystem. 

To build a national "culture sustained research but 

also skillful and deliberate catalysts to hasten 

innovation ecosystem could also help 

Engineering knowledge paradigms altog,etl1.er. 

through the 1-Corps program. 

and shift Science and 

There are four distinct components of the 1-Corps program 

.. Teams- These are the are funded to go through the NSF 

National !-Corps Teams Program. The are comprised of at least three members, 

including a technical lead, the scientist or engineer entrepreneurial lead, and the 

industry Mentor. This is program scientists and engineers to 

learn how to market opportunity created by their technology. !-Corps does not 

fund the R&D itself It the or invalidation, of the product (or 

teehnology)-market 

" Nodes- These arc regional hubs and research that 

academic scientists and engineers in 'm"'''~nnn ~-t,"''"-''J Nodes provide the backb<me 
19 

to support the Teams program 

audiences. 

work to the training to new partners and 

Sites- These are awards to '"''w'w'" intended to catalyze the 

engagement of local teams in technology transJtW>n and strengthen local innovation 

academic 

ecosystems. 

National Innovation Network. -

partners and others comprise 

sustain the national innovation ""''"'Q"''" 

!-Corps Highlights: 

• 8 Nodes involving 28 universities 

• 86 Sites 

• l 000+ Teams fw1dcd by NSF 1) 

• 450+ startups created 

our Nodes, Sites, Teams, other agency 

CO!)pe:rativelyto build, utilize, and 

" 9 MOUs with other Federal programs been adopted and adapted 

in partnerships with a growing number of Federal agencies, including the National 

Institutes of Health (NIH), Department (DOE), Department of Defense (DOD), 

National Security Agency United States of Agriculture (USDA), 

Department of Homeland (DHS), Research Projects Agency- Energy 

(ARPA-E), National Administration (NASA), and the Small 

Business Administration (SBA). 

" The I-Corps model has been adopted of Ohio. 

outcomes for the !-Corps center those tangible that 

relate to the societal application NSf's investments in basic research. For 

example, successful completion of the 1-Corps grant would be to contribute to one or 

more of the following: 

.. New start -up businesses; 

• Licensing; 

• SBIR/STTR proposals: 

• A business opportunity suitable by third-party investors; 

Students prepared to be entrepreneurially competitive; and 

• Researchers able to market and better to align research directions 

with commercial opportunity. 

Next Steps 

Training scientists and evaluate out of the lab to speak 

with potential customers and stakeholders in the main of the !-Corps 

program. We are excited to move the program into its next phase. NSF has pilot 

programs eunent!y underway to lay the for In collaboration 

NSF SBIR/STTR program we have launched 0 pilot Through this 

>UJJjJ<.>w,ug non-academic teams of very early startups or pre-startups that are rle,;el.nnin" 

gmne-ctmr:gl!1g technologies. These Phase 0 Teams will receive national I-Corps training as well 

4 
20 

as Go" that addresses some of the more 

common in startup forn1ation, incorporation, licensing and of 

intellectual property, and fundraising. '·!-Corps on 

more than just the 

As we look ahead 

• Leverage 

" Prepare scientists and engineers 

entrepreneurship and commercialization, 

" Promote the conunercial societal benef!! technologies funded by the 

US Government, 

" Tum ideas 

" 

Summary 

primary mission is 

research. The !-Corps 

address societal needs 

I-Corps designed to create a 

leaders, and to accelerate 

Corps taps 

take money away from basic 

and cultures of academic m:;tltulJ.onB. 

be leveraged with a little nudge into activities of potential commercial benefit !-

targets the critical gap that occuts just before researchers have advanced their 

to detennine whether they with market fit the formation 

company that will request SB!R/STTR 

investment NSF investments 

challenges inherent 

Directorate of the Foundation. The !-Corps Team 

the rigorous entrepreneurship 

hYJootheE:is-·dri·ven approach 

cmnrrten:m! viability of completed and engineering research. Academic 

institutions are partners national network, is the private sector. Technology 

developers, business leaders, experienced entrepreneurs serve 

providing critical support by sharing network operates to 

5 
21 

enhance the ability 

successful technologies. 

questions. 

results into potentially 
22 

Dr. Dawn M. Tilbnry 

position 

relereedjoumals and conference 

2008 Fellow of the ASME in and 

7 
23 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. And now, we’ll hear from 

Mr. Blank. 

TESTIMONY OF MR. STEVE BLANK, 

ADJUNCT PROFESSOR, 

MANAGEMENT SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, 

STANFORD UNIVERSITY 

Mr. BLANK. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock, and thank you, 

Ranking Member Lipinski and Ranking Member Johnson. Thank 

you for inviting me to participate in this hearing. 

Six years ago, the NSF recognized that scientists who received 

government commercialization grants were having a real hard time 

getting to the next step of raising private capital. And so the genesis of this I–Corps program is pretty simple. First, figure out why 

this was. Why were scientists having a hard time getting private 

capital, and why are they having a hard time building successful 

companies? And once we figured it out, then can we teach them the 

skills that they were missing? 

And it soon became apparent that they were having a hard time 

raising money is that the scientists simply couldn’t speak the language of private capital investors. University scientists believe that 

just having innovative technology was enough to make a successful 

business. The reality is that’s just plain wrong. Great technology 

is just one part of a successful company. Private investors, venture 

capitalists, and angel investors needed to hear more than just the 

technology. 

To speak to VCs or angel investors, scientists needed to learn 

things that weren’t in their Ph.D. program. They needed to figure 

out how to turn their innovations in the lab into product that people actually wanted to buy. They had to figure out who their customers were going to be and how the product would be sold. They 

needed to talk to regulators and understand patents and licensing 

issues and understand how to create customer demand. How much 

would it cost to make their product and how many would they sell 

and what price? 

In the past, when a scientist started a company, they’d write up 

all these answers to these questions, put it in a business plan, hire 

the people, build the product, and only find out years later into the 

company that their assumptions, their guesses what the customer 

wanted were wrong. 

Now, I–Corps starts with the premise that, on day one, all an entrepreneur has is a series of untested hypotheses, which is a fancy 

word for they’re just guessing, about each part of their business. 

We teach I–Corps in a way that’s pretty extraordinary. When we 

teach scientists all the theory about starting a company, we also 

make them get their hands dirty by having them get out of their 

labs and test their hypothesis by talking to 10 to 15 customers a 

week. And they use the feedback from those customers to improve 

multiple versions of their product. By the time the class is over 

they’ve talked to over 100 people. We now know the I–Corps method of teaching scientists to get out of the building and talk to people turns theorists into capitalists. 

And our scientists actually love this I–Corps learning process because what they’re doing is actually running the scientific method, 
24 

this time with potential customers rather than test tubes in a lab. 

So when you hear the phrase ‘‘I–Corps is a bridge to private capital,’’ you know that means that we teach our best scientists to 

learn a new set of skills that help them raise money to build companies. And these are companies that could create not just new 

products but new jobs, and not just in Silicon Valley but in districts 

like yours. 

Now, having spent 21 years building companies, my first instinct 

was this type of education should be done by existing private incubators and accelerators, not the government. However, our observation six years ago is still true today. While the NSF-funded technologies can turn into future companies, most don’t fit the model 

of grow into a billion-dollar valuation in three years that private 

incubators and accelerators are looking for. 

The teams that I–Corps teaches require the patience and the 

long-term vision that the NSF brings. NSF-funded scientists and 

engineers are working on what we call deep tech, really long-term, 

geeky technology like new material, new devices outside of the 

mainstream of social media and smartphone apps. Yet for our 

country, turning these innovations in a products might have the 

biggest payoff. 

We now know that, without I–Corps training, most of our advanced technologies would never turn into companies. There’s one 

other thing about these deep technologies that’s becoming more evident. Many are potentially dual-use technologies, meaning they 

have potential commercial companies, but their products can be 

also used for the Department of Defense and our intelligence community to keep our country safe and secure. 

So America is better for having I–Corps. It’s made turning our 

government-funded science into companies more efficient. We 

should do more of I–Corps. We can make it broader and better, 

reaching more people and teaching more skills. First, keep in mind 

that, today, I–Corps is for university scientists funded by the NSF, 

but if you’re outside a university, you can’t take this class, and 

that’s a shame. Since we now know we have an effective program, 

we ought to share it with all Americans, not just the few in universities. We ought to open the I–Corps to innovators and entrepreneurs who have ideas in every part of the country whether 

they’re in a university or a garage that aren’t yet ready for private 

capital. 

The second way to make I–Corps better is to improve on what 

we’ve learned over the last six years. One of our biggest learnings 

is that even after teams have been through the I–Corps, they need 

to learn additional skills like how to hire and build teams that 

know how to sell and market the product, how to grow in scale a 

company, and how to find investors who want deep technology. 

NSF is currently testing this follow-on class, as you’ve heard, called 

I–Corps Go. 

I hope everyone in this Committee is proud of the I–Corps program that you’ve created and supported. It’s one of the programs 

that continues to make America great. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Blank follows:] 
25 

me 

to on or 

no 

to 

out 

It soon reason were a 

Blank Testimony of 6 
26 

a 

more 

or 

to 

answers to 

Istarts one 

Steve Blank Testimony 
27 

are a 

we 

to 

over 1 

turns 

to 

to 

Blank Testimony 
28 

can create not new new 

was 

our 

't 

term 

as 

Steve Blank Testimony 
29 

our 

our 

lS 

Blank Testimony 

secure. 

can 

to 

our 
30 

are a a aren 

to 011 

a 

J 

one 

to 

Steve Blank Testimony 
31 

Steve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at 

California at Berkeley, and a Senior 

Lecturer at the University of 

Columbia University. 

foundation for the Lean Startup movement. 

Lean revolutionized how innovation and implemented in startups, companies and 

government agencies. Steve's 2011 class on innovation at Stanford was adopted by the 

National Science Foundation and is the the Innovation Corps (1-Corps.) 

/-Corps is now taught at 86 colleges and 

country's best scientists and engineers 

in the U.S. Over 1,000 teams of the 

through the program. 

His follow-on class, Hacking for Defense Defense Authorization 

Act), allows students to work on solving urgent problems for the Department of Defense 

and community. The class is currently offered at nine other universities. 

Prior to becoming an educator, Steve spent 

Valley startups. 

as an entrepreneur in eight Silicon 

Steve served in the U.S. Force during the Vietnam war. 
32 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. I now recognize Dr. Chang. 

TESTIMONY OF DR. DEAN CHANG, 

ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, 

INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP, 

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND; 

LEAD PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, 

DC I-CORPS REGIONAL NODE 

Dr. CHANG. Good morning, Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking 

Members Johnson and Lipinski, and distinguished Members of the 

House Science Subcommittee. I’m greatly appreciative of the opportunity to testify and engage in a discussion with all of you about 

the NSF I–Corps program. 

My name is Dean Chang. Sometimes it helps if I clarify that 

Dean is my name, not my title. I’m the Associate V.P. for Innovation Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland. And we’ve already heard from my fellow witnesses about the lab-to-market impact that I–Corps has had. So as a Lead Principal Investigator for 

the NSF I–Corps node for the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area— 

we like to call it the DMV node—I’d like to use my five minutes 

to highlight two specific areas of impact of I–Corps. 

Area number one, the impact of I–Corps on the regional and national level; and area number two, the impact of I–Corps on undergraduate education. Area number one, NSF has created a National 

Innovation Network with eight I–Corps nodes across the country. 

What is a node, you might ask? Well, nodes are basically charged 

with rallying and marshalling together the many universities, investors, entrepreneurs, and industries in our geographic regions 

and getting everyone to work together as one. It’s my observation 

that this has been one of the hallmarks and most impactful contributions of the NSF I–Corps program. In the past, critical startup 

knowledge of what worked and what didn’t often lived in the heads 

of a few expert individuals. Most universities didn’t have easy access to these individuals, and that’s really all changed now with I– 

Corps nodes. 

Here in the DMV node we have built up a strong bench with over 

a dozen I–Corps instructors from University of Maryland, Johns 

Hopkins, Virginia Tech, George Washington, Howard University. 

Once or twice a year, NSF sends us about 25 teams for the national I–Corps training, but the rest of the year our dozen I–Corps 

instructors continue to teach in various versions of the I–Corps program throughout the region to 200 teams each year and these— 

those instructors even travel to other schools to provide this I– 

Corps training to teams from George Mason, from University of 

Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth, Morgan State, and even outside 

the DMV to schools in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. 

This means that a team from just about any school in our region 

can get access to any instructor from our node. For instance, if 

you’re a team from Morgan State, you now have access to our instructor from Johns Hopkins, who specializes in life sciences; our 

instructor from Maryland, who specializes in virtual-reality, augmented reality, and UAVs; our instructor from Virginia Tech, who 
33 

specializes in DOD-funded companies; or our instructor from 

George Washington, who specializes in international markets. 

And this picture I paint for our DMV node is the same at the 

other nodes as well. In the Midwest, the University of Michigan 

collaborates with Purdue and University of Illinois and other 

schools in that region. In the Southeast, Georgia Tech does the 

same with Universities of Alabama and Tennessee and other 

schools in their region. And the same for the nodes in the Northeast, the West Coast, the Southwest. So this National Innovation 

Network of nodes created by NSF really has an ‘‘all for one and one 

for all’’ sense of community across the regions and across the country. 

Area number two, the curriculum and methods in the national I– 

Corps training are also widely being integrated—being widely integrated into undergraduate education. At the University of Maryland, key components of I–Corps training have been incorporated 

into over 50 courses reaching over 7,000 students each year. One 

of those classes is the senior capstone course in bioengineering in 

which students spend the year working with doctors to design medical devices. Before incorporating I–Corps into the course, some 

beautiful devices were designed and manufactured with little regard to validating a business model. Now, the students spend time 

in customer discovery and learn how improved health care also requires purchasing, reimbursement, regulatory, and other issues be 

part of any successful business model. 

Two students in the course, Shawn Greenspan and Stefanie 

Cohen said, quote, ‘‘I–Corps finally put us on the road to real customer discovery. Our initial business plan started with an incorrectly identified buyer, value propositions that were wrong, and 

guesses everywhere else. Fortunately, after 67 interviews, we now 

have a developing revenue model. We still lots of work to do, but 

we now know where our answers lie: outside the building.’’ 

Shawn is now working at Palantir Technologies, and Stefanie 

works for a spinal surgical implant company, and both Shawn and 

Stephanie site I–Corps as a formative experience that gave them 

the essential skills to be able to accelerate technology into the market, skills that they are both using in their jobs today. Many of the 

over 100 colleges teaching I–Corps have similar stories of the impact I–Corps is having on undergraduate education. 

In conclusion, I–Corps has created a significant culture change 

across campuses both among students as well as faculty. Faculty 

who go through the national I–Corps training get connected to the 

tremendous resources of the National Innovation Network and 

come back eager to apply I–Corps principles to their entire research portfolio, as well as to their teaching. That in turn better 

prepares and better equips students to make an impact on the 

economy and in society, whether it be at a startup, at a large company, or even at a nonprofit or in government. 

Lastly, one of the things that made I–Corps so successful has 

been the flexibility for I–Corps nodes to experiment and innovate 

with the I–Corps program itself. In I–Corps we push scientists to 

go beyond their comfort zone to find the unexpected opportunities, 

so we need to continue to push ourselves out of our comfort zone 

to keep making I–Corps better. Thank you. 
34 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Chang follows:] 
35 

ACADEMY FOR INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP 

Edward John Teaching & 1130, College Park, MD 20742 

TESTIMONY OF DR. DEAN CHANG 

Before the 

House Committee on Space, and Technology 

Subcommittee Research and Technology 

Hearing Titled 

"From Lab to Market: A Review NSF Corps" 

Wednesday, December 2017 

Good morning, Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski, and distinguished members 

of this House Science Subcommittee. I am greatly appreciative opportunity to testify and 

engage in a discussion with all of the NSF !-Corps program. 

My name is Dr. Dean Chang. Sometimes helps I clarify that Dean is my name, not my title. 

I'm the Associate Vice President for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the University of 

Maryland, We've already heard a lot from fellow witnesses about the lab-to-market impact 

that 1-Corps has had, So as the lead principal investigator for the NSF !-Corps Node for the DC, 

Maryland, and Virginia area {the DMV Node), like to use my five minutes to highlight two 

specific areas of impact of 1-Corps: 

• Area #1: Impact of !-Corps regional and 

• Area #2: Impact of !-Corps on undergraduate education 

Area #1: Impact of 1-Corps Nodes on the regional and national level 

NSF has created a National Innovation Network seven 1-Corps Nodes across the country, 

What is a Node? Nodes are basically charged rallying and marshalling together the many 

universities, investors, entrepreneurs, and industries in our geographic regions and getting 

everyone to work together as one. It my that this has been one of the hallmarks 

and most impactful contributions of the NSF !-Corps program. 

In the past, critical startup knowledge of what worked and what didn't often lived in the heads 

of a few expert individuals, most universities didn't have easy access to those individuals. 

That's all changed with !-Corps Nodes, 

Here in the DMV Node, we have built a strong bench with over a dozen 1-Corps instructors 

from UMD, JHU, VT, GWU, and Howard. Once or twice a NSF sends us about 25 teams for 

the nationaii-Corps training. But the rest of the dozen !-Corps instructors continue to 
36 

ACADEMY FOR INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP 

Edward St. John Teaching & Learning 1130, College Park, MD 20742 

teach in various versions of 1-Corps programs throughout the region to another 200 teams each 

year, Those instructors even travel to schools to provide !-Corps training to teams from 

schools like George Mason, UVA, VCU, Morgan State, outside the DMV to schools in 

Pennsylvania and North Carolina. 

This means a team from just about any our region can get access to any instructor 

from our Node. For instance, if you're team Morgan State, we can connect you with our 

instructor from who specializes life sciences; or our instructor from UMD who specializes 

in VR/AR, and UAVs; or instructor VTwho specializes DOD-funded companies; or 

our instructor from GWU who specializes in markets. 

This picture! paint our DMV Node at the other six Nodes. In the Midwest Node, 

the University of Michigan collaborates with Purdue and University of Illinois and other schools 

in that region. In the Southeast Node, Tech collaborates University of Alabama 

and University of Tennessee and other schools in that region. The same for the Nodes in the 

Northeast, West Coast, and Southwest. This National Innovation Network of Nodes created by 

NSF really has an "All for one, one for all" sense across regions across the 

country. 

integrated 

into undergraduate education. 

At the University of Maryland, key components 1-Corps have been incorporated into 

over SO courses reaching over 7,000 students each year. One of those classes is the senior 

capstone course in bioengineering in students spend the year working with doctors to 

design medical devices. Before incorporating 1-Corps into the course, some beautiful devices 

were designed and manufactured with regard validating a business model. Now the 

students spend time in customer discovery learn how improved healthcare also requires 

purchasing, reimbursement, and regulatory be part any successful business model. 

Two students in the course, Shawn Greenspan and Stefanie said, "1-Corps finally put us 

on the road to real customer discovery. Our business plan started with an incorrectly 

identified buyer, value propositions that were wrong, and guesses everywhere else. Fortunately 

after 67 interviews we now have ... model. We still have lots of work to 
37 

INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP 

Edward John Suite 1130, College Park, MD 20742 

Shawn is now working for Palantir Technologies, and Stefanie works for a spinal surgical implant 

company. Both Shawn and Stefanie cite !-Corps a formative experience that gave them the 

essential skills to be able to accelerate technology into the market, skills that they are both 

using their jobs today. 

Many of the 85 other colleges teaching 

having on undergraduate education. 

Conclusion 

similar stories of the impact is 

In conclusion, 1-Corps has created a significant change across campuses among both 

students as well as faculty. Faculty who go through nationaii-Corps training get connected 

to the tremendous resources of the National Innovation Network and come back eager to apply 

!-Corps principles to their entire research portfolio as as to teaching. That in turn 

better prepares and better equips students make impact on the economy and in society, 

whether it be at a startup, at a large or at a non-profit or in the government. 

lastly, one of the things that has made !-Corps so has been the flexibility for !-Corps 

Nodes to experiment and innovate with the !-Corps program In !-Corps we push scientists 

to go beyond their comfort zone the unexpected opportunities, so we need to continue 

to push ourselves out of our comfort zone well to keep making 1-Corps better. Thank you for 

your time, and I'm eager hear your questions. 
38 

Edward John Teaching & learning 

BIO FOR DR. DEAN CHANG 

Dr. Dean Chang's passion is helping students and researchers discover and cultivate the 

innovator and entrepreneurial mindset of them. He is the University of Maryland's 

(UMD) founding Associate VP for the Academy for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (AlE), 

reporting to the President and Provost and tasked with engaging all 37,000 students 12 

colleges in innovation. He a PI and in the Science Foundation's (NSF)ICorps Node program. He develops and teaches I&E curriculum school and college 

students, university researchers, and '""JPr.nmPnt ag<:nc1es. 

Prior to UMD, Dean spent 15 Silicon Valley he served as the Chief Technology 

Officer of Immersion Corporation, a venture-backed, Stanford University robotics lab spinout 

that later became a publicly traded IMMR), world-leading licensor of haptics 

technology with customers that included Sony, BMW, and Samsung. 

Dean holds over 40 U.S. and international and has a bachelor's degree mechanical 

engineering from MIT, a PhD mechanical engineering from Stanford, and an MBA from 

Wharton. 
39 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you, Dr. Chang. 

And now, we’ll hear from Dr. Carter. 

TESTIMONY OF DR. SUE CARTER, 

PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, 

DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR INNOVATION 

AND ENTREPRENEURIAL DEVELOPMENT, 

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ 

Dr. CARTER. Thank you. Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski and Johnson, and Members of the Subcommittee, it’s 

an honor to appear before you today. My name is Sue Carter, and 

I am a three-time participant in the NSF I–Corps program and currently run the NSF I–Corps site at the University of California 

Santa Cruz. 

In addition, I’m a physics professor who has transitioned basics 

research out of the lab into startup companies three times. Consequently, I can provide you my experience with NSF I–Corps as 

a student and teacher of the curriculum and as a faculty member 

and entrepreneur. 

The strength of NSF I–Corps program is that it pushes researchers to get out of the lab and into the community to talk to potential 

customers, enabling them to better understand the societal value 

or lack thereof that their research has. For me as a faculty member, the insight has resulted in doing much more impactful applied 

research. Similarly, as an entrepreneur, the NSF I–Corps program 

has resulted in me spending substantially less time and money to 

get a product to market. 

Let me provide some—a few concrete examples. I have been a 

principal at four startup companies: Add-vision, Solexant, 

Soliculture, and the IRIS Science Academy. The first two companies are before I had NSF I–Corps training, and the last two are 

after I went through NSF I–Corps training. At Add-vision, we 

raised over $6 million in funding both from strategic partners and 

government grants. We used this funding to develop a printable organic light emitting diode technology to meet commercial specs 

given to us by our partner, but we never fully identified a customer 

for the product, and thus, we ended up selling the company to 

Sumitomo, a Japanese company. 

If I had had the experience of the NSF I–Corps program, I believe we could have identified customers much earlier on and 

grown our vision into a U.S.-based company that could have been 

a leader in organic light emitting diode technology, creating hundreds of U.S. jobs. 

At Solexant, we raised over $30 million in venture capital funding. This money was focused on developing a thin-film solar cell 

technology and building a manufacturing line in Oregon. However, 

yet again, we failed to identify a customer and value proposition for 

the product that was developed, which ultimately led to the manufacturing facility never being built. After burning through much of 

the initial multimillion dollar investment, the company was taken 

over by new management who understood that the value that we 

provided to our companies was the low-cost manufacturing process 
40 

that made the solar cells rather than—I’m sorry, to our customers—rather than the solar cells themselves. 

If we had the experience of the NSF I–Corps program, I’m confident we would have come to the correct product decision two 

years earlier, enabling us to direct the initial $30 million to ensure 

U.S. solar industry’s leadership in thin-film technologies rather 

than losing much of this market share to China. 

The two companies I started after NSF I–Corps resulted in us 

being able to sell commercial product to customers with much less 

time and funding, namely less than $2 million in the case of 

Soliculture and less than $10,000 in the case of the Science Academy. The efficiency directly resulted from our many conversations 

with the potential customers and key partners that the NSF I– 

Corps program largely forced us to do. While it’s too early to know 

how many jobs Soliculture will generate, its pathway to selling 

commercial product was many years faster than my two previous 

companies. 

Needless to say, I’m convinced that the small cost of the NSF I– 

Corps training pays for itself many times over in reducing startups 

time to market. For startups that receive funding through the 

SBIR or STTR program, which I’ve also received funding from, this 

also gives U.S. taxpayer money—this also saves U.S. taxpayer 

money as it allows the principal investigators to use the funding 

much more efficiently to develop a technology that someone is willing to pay for. 

Given my positive experience as a faculty member in the NSF I– 

Corps program, I decided to offer the curriculum to students at my 

university through a summer entrepreneurship academy. While 

only a few of the students going through the program actually start 

companies, the training has proven invaluable to students as they 

seek employment after they graduate. Students have come back to 

tell me that this is the most valuable course they took at UCSC 

and received their job offer because they had taken the I–Corps 

course. 

Understanding how to listen to your customers and make 

changes to a product so that it fulfills their needs is important in 

almost any job but something that academia is very bad at teaching students as we find ourselves sometimes stuck in the echo 

chamber of a university. 

I want to conclude with how the program can move forward to 

better benefit students and entrepreneurs. So I’m running out of 

time. I’m going to basically say that I’m a strong proponent of I– 

Corps Go that is expanding our training so that students can learn 

how to talk to VCs, how to form teams, and how to understand the 

legal context behind their startups. 

The other major issue is that the training is largely limited to 

students, faculty, and their mentors, so I’d like to see the program 

open up to our entrepreneurs, many of whom are likely to be willing to pay to take the course. I know I would have been. Some of 

our top young entrepreneurs received funding through the SBIR/ 

STTR program, so that might be an excellent vehicle to expand the 

offering. 

So, Madam Chairwoman, this completes my testimony, and I’m 

looking forward to your questions. 
41 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Carter follows:] 
42 

of NSF 

name is been a 3-time participant in NSF!-

program and nm site at the of California, 

Santa Cruz. In addition, lam a who has transitioned basic 

research out of the lab into start-up three l 

my experience with !-Corps as a student teacher of the curriculum, 

and as a member and entrepreneur has started companies both before 

and after the NSF program. 

to better understand the 

customers. For me, this 

research with less time and money 

impact the lives of US citizens. 

program has resulted me in 

to 

training. 

At Add-vision, we raised 

million in from 

an entrepreneur, 

less time and money to get 

Sold to 

Sumitomo in 2011. 

and 
43 

that 

never 

much of the initial multimillion dollar 

investment, that company was 

new management who understood 

value that we 

the low cost 

process that made solar cells, rather then the 

solar cells themselves. Siva Power 

NSF 

received their 
44 

offer because had 

your customers and make 

in almost any but its 

students as we find ourselves 

rti,cino>ho as 

to other entrepreneurs, many 

course. l know I would have been. Some of our top 

the so may be 

could move forward 

in 

program up 

to pay to take the 

entrepreneurs receive 

excellent vehicle to 
45 

Prof. Sue Carter, Ph.D 

and/or scientific founder 

Solcxant (now Siva Power), ,,u'''"'''"w'"' 

also served scientillc cornpzmi($ 

Biometrics. Carter holds six 

NSF I-Corps site at UCSC. 

film technologies, solid 

tcchmJ!o_glCs. She is a recipient of the 

American Physical Society. 
46 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you very much. 

Well, on that note then I think I would like to ask how are 

some—you know, we have community colleges. We also often have 

weekend programs that are adjunct like the Darden School does in 

UVA, so George Mason. Lots of our universities have that capacity 

to do that. How could we implement this program with them, and 

are there any limitations right now to doing that? 

Dr. CARTER. Do you want me to address that? Well, I mean, I 

can tell you right now that there’s nothing that limits us from 

working with community colleges. I have a lot of community colleges in my area that—and I include those students in our curriculum, so it just involves building a network and reaching out to 

those colleges, so I don’t think there’s any limit at all. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Or and like—since we’re talking 

about—— 

Dr. CARTER. Right. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. —people not even having to be in a curriculum but just having the facility where they can go so they can 

get the program. 

Dr. CARTER. Right. Yes. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Okay. And, Dr. Chang, did you want 

to—— 

Dr. CHANG. Sure. And so I kind of alluded to this earlier, that 

we’ve got this great bench of over a dozen instructors who have 

worked at startups who have this experience that we’re talking 

about in teaching I–Corps, and when they’re not teaching in the official NSF I–Corps cohorts, we put them to work to go to other 

schools in the region or even outside the region. And what we’ve 

seen is that partly solves this problem, so we can offer cohorts on 

the campus at UVA or wherever else to help those—help the teams 

there. 

But long-term what we really need to do is kind of like what 

NSF does with the national program of train the trainer so the 

somebody at UVA or somebody—actually they have pretty good capacity already but some of these schools can develop their own people that can continue to teach it more often they know their own 

campuses better. They know what resonates with their faculty and 

what’s going to get them to come to increase participation as well. 

So, you know, train the trainer has been a centerpiece of the national program, and it’s a point of emphasis in the regional programs and needs to continue to be more of a point of emphasis 

among regional programs. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. And by doing that train the trainer program, you really could then have a self-sustaining program wherever they’ve done that because I know at UVA, for example, the 

Darden School makes money for the school is my understanding—— 

Dr. CHANG. Yes. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. —so if they’re able then to attract and 

people can, you know, go and do that there or other universities—— 

Dr. CHANG. Absolutely. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. —it’s a money generator that would 

support the whole education program. 
47 

Dr. CHANG. Yes, absolutely. And you hit one of the key challenges I’ll say but it’s the—but we’re seeing some successes in that 

the universities that can offer this kind of training need to figure 

out a way how they can continue to provide it not just as volunteer 

work. 

So if it can be sustainable, if there’s a business model, whether 

it’s like Darden’s executive education model or even partnering 

with economic development agencies, whether it’s Virginia Center, 

CIT, or Maryland TEDCO, the state economic development agencies, if they fund some of these programs to—for these instructors, 

now, you’ve got like the self-sustaining ecosystem which helps the 

economic development agencies because the money, the grants, the 

investments they make in their companies are going to pay off— 

be more likely to pay off if they’ve had this I–Corps-like training. 

So we’re starting to see some of that, but formalizing that is really 

critical. 

Dr. CARTER. I want—I was going to add one more thing here. I 

mean at UC Santa Cruz we actually started the course before we 

actually had the funding, so I had to come up with a way to fund 

it. And the way we did it is it’s actually part of our required—it’s 

a course that students can take to fulfill the requirement for graduation, so it’s—you know, they pay tuition and fees. It’s called 

‘‘Creative’’ believe it or not. Its focus on—it fills our creative general credit, and so students can take it to help them graduate with 

their degree. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. All right. And then as part of sort of the 

whole regional innovation ecosystem, what other places could we 

plug this in? Because I’m thinking—we have throughout my district we have sort of startup areas, but what I hear from young 

people who want to leave here and go to California or Colorado or 

someplace where they feel is a little bit more startup-friendly, that 

there’s more sort of just like say your local chamber or your local 

county government has sort of these, you know, centers where you 

can go and have that type of innovation ecosystem. Is there a 

way—I mean, there’s nothing preventing us from plugging that 

into whatever type of startup center or innovation center that you 

might have in your area, right? 

Dr. CHANG. Absolutely not. In fact, you know, I think one of the 

really—the real valuable things about doing the customer discovery 

that we’ve all talked about going to talk to customers is sometimes 

you might find that the only viable customer might be in a different location, in which case the prudent thing would be to go 

there, but oftentimes you might find there are some customers 

right in your backyard that you never knew about, and it wasn’t 

until you got out of the building and talked to them and understood 

their needs that you realize that there’s basically this goldmine in 

your backyard that you never really investigated. Absolutely. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Okay. Great. Well, thank you. 

And I now yield to Mr. Lipinski for five minutes. 

Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you, Chairwoman. 

I wanted to in some way sort of follow up on that with a question 

of how can this help—how can I–Corps be leveraged for, you know, 

economic revitalization in areas that—you know, we’re talking 

about doing this in areas that, you know, are already pretty—doing 
48 

pretty well, especially if you have a big university, but how about 

economically depressed regions of the country? How could this have 

an impact? And I’ll start with Mr. Blank. 

Mr. BLANK. Well, Congressman, I think that’s a great question. 

If—but if you remember, not only are there eight nodes, there are 

86 sites across the country that now teach the I–Corps class and 

methodology. And many of them are in communities where they’re 

past clusters, whether it was manufacturing or other past 20th-century industries have collapsed. And now for the first time this can 

be a seat around this college and university of training entrepreneurs that don’t have to go to Boston or New York or Silicon 

Valley to actually stay in their local communities and start building companies. And as Dr. Chang mentioned, these universities 

and colleges are figuring out how to partner with their own regional economic development organizations to actually get the capital to scale to the next level. And so what we’ve started to see is 

I–Corps is kind of the rejuvenation of innovation and entrepreneurship in places that historically have just been bypassed in the last 

decade or so, and we’re kind of proud of this consequence of the 

program. 

Dr. TILBURY. Can I—— 

Mr. LIPINSKI. Dr. Tilbury? 

Dr. TILBURY. Yes. I would just add that the I–Corps teams come 

from almost every State in the country, so even though the nodes 

are—there’s eight of them in 86 sites, as he mentioned, there are 

teams coming from almost every corner of the country, and they 

can take their learning that they had in the I–Corps program back 

to their home district to start their company if that’s really the 

right place for it, as was mentioned. 

Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you. Dr. Carter, you want to add something? 

Dr. CARTER. I wanted to say that the University of California 

Santa Cruz it might sound like it’s near Silicon Valley, but we’re 

actually sitting in the middle of Salinas Valley. We have the highest youth crime rate within an hour of us. We’re also one of the 

highest poverty areas in California. So we’re a Hispanic-serving institution, so we’re mainly servicing those students that are underprivileged and have had very difficult circumstances growing up. 

We have a lot of first-generation students in our programs. 

And I would like to say that in terms of diversity, STEM diversity, I see more diversity in I–Corps than I do with our science and 

engineering classes. I think that the first-generation students, the 

students that don’t have the privileged backgrounds, realize how 

important it is for them to learn entrepreneurial skills, be able to 

create their own jobs, and so they are very much attracted to those 

courses, more so than the standard STEM students who just think 

they’re going to go get a job in Silicon Valley and they’re going to 

be done with it, right? So I think that this is a way to actually get 

underrepresented minorities involved in STEM careers. 

Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you. I want to ask about the—you know I— 

well, I’ll just say obviously, the—one of the strongest arguments in 

favor of I–Corps is it’s transformative. You know, you have a small 

amount of government investment in education yielding huge results in terms of the ability of participants to learn entrepreneur-
49 

ship, attract follow-on funding, hopefully achieve their—and some 

have—certainly achieved their commercialization goals. So expanding the program, I want to ask Mr. Blank. How do you think that 

the expanded curriculum would be similarly transformative? 

Mr. BLANK. Thank you, Congressman. You know, one of the 

things we’ve now learned over six years is that this program does 

a spectacular job of teaching scientists things they thought they 

could precomputed like who a customer should be and how do I 

price it and where do we sell it. And as—for the last—previous 30 

years we’ve discovered, no, you can’t precompute that without getting out of the building. Now that we got them to understand who 

customers are, we realize that the next step is teaching them how 

to actually raise money and build teams and actually turn this into 

a scalable company. And that’s after we’ve kind of raised the bar. 

We just realized we need to raise the bar again. And the NSF has 

pioneered these prototypes of I–Corps Go classes that I think are 

doing just that to actually accelerate these teams to the next step 

in commercialization. And I think this is spectacular for the country. 

I should also mention, by the way, this I–Corps curriculum has 

become the gold standard not only in our federal research agencies 

but now in the DOD and intelligence community as well. It’s now 

being adopted in almost every agency and across the world as well, 

just an amazing program and kudos to the NSF. 

Mr. LIPINSKI. Thank you. My time is up. I yield back. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. And I now recognize Mr. 

Webster. 

Mr. WEBSTER. Thank you, Madam Chair. 

Mr. Blank, I heard another definition of hypothesis. That is a 

wild guess carried out to two decimal places. But, Dr. Tilbury, I 

had a question. I’m from Central Florida, the University of Central 

Florida. They’re one of the sites. And are all of the sites universities? 

Dr. TILBURY. Yes, I believe all the sites are universities, but they 

serve the broader population of their region. 

Mr. WEBSTER. So are they usually housed in some—one or more 

colleges of that university or are they housed in a separate center 

or how does it usually work? 

Dr. TILBURY. I think it depends on the university. It could be 

housed in, say, the College of Engineering or the Vice President for 

Research or even a center for entrepreneurship if there is one at 

the university. I don’t think there’s a standard. 

Mr. WEBSTER. So there’s no real—there’s just a framework but 

not a big—— 

Dr. TILBURY. It’s a framework, and each university who applies 

to be a site talks about what niche they intend to fill with their 

site and how that will work for them. Maybe Dr. Carter could talk 

about—she has a site at UC Santa Cruz. 

Mr. WEBSTER. Okay. Let me ask you something. Dr. Carter, is 

yours external to the university or a separate entity? 

Dr. CARTER. Ours is internal. Ours is actually under the division 

of graduate studies, which means it can represent every—all the 

disciplines equally. But we also work with undergraduates, too, 

even though we’re in the graduate studies. 
50 

Mr. WEBSTER. Before you got the grant, did you have a similar 

program or something that would be a cousin to that ongoing? 

Dr. CARTER. Not exactly. We had some starting pieces of it, but 

we do not have any business school or law school at University of 

California Santa Cruz, so this is our—this is basically the training 

our students get to launch their businesses. So the funding really 

helped us. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do today without the 

funding. 

Mr. WEBSTER. So—but if there were some things were working 

that would kind of be a cousin to that, did those remain or did you 

just to begin focusing on—— 

Dr. CARTER. They remained. 

Mr. WEBSTER. They did? 

Dr. CARTER. Yes. 

Mr. WEBSTER. So tell me a little bit about the governance of it. 

Dr. CARTER. Sure. So in our case we have a—I’m the director of 

the center. We have an executive leadership board, which has all 

the deans from the campus that oversee what we’re doing, and also 

we have a faculty advisory board that contains faculty and staff 

that advise our program. And then underneath us we run about 

four different other entrepreneurial sites that were kind of the 

framework, but their centers focus on social and creative entrepreneurship, on STEM-based entrepreneurship, on art-based entrepreneurship, and we help those three programs also, providing them 

the instructors they need to run their courses. 

Mr. WEBSTER. So is the team or teams—I guess you have more 

than one team—— 

Dr. CARTER. Yes. 

Mr. WEBSTER. —are they led by a faculty member? 

Dr. CARTER. No, they are—they’re advised by a faculty member 

and a mentor. So I have an open-door policy. Any team that 

wants—I meet with all the teams regularly to give them advice to 

how to move forward. I set them up with mentors that they may 

need to get help. If there’s another faculty member that I think can 

help them, I will send them directly to the other faculty member 

or sometimes it’s a staff member. So we make sure that we meet 

with them regularly and they get the resources they need to get 

the—move their thing forward. 

Mr. WEBSTER. Dr. Tilbury, is there a cutoff point where, okay, 

there are these teams, they’re working on an idea, they want to 

turn it into a business, they want to be entrepreneurs. Is there a 

cutoff point or some way where you decide it’ll either happen or it 

won’t happen or is that done by money, just you can get any 

money, or what? 

Dr. TILBURY. So the I–Corps training, the formal training is 

about six weeks, and at the end of that six weeks, each team 

should have a decision, yes, we’re going to go ahead and commercialize the technology or no, it’s not ready yet, we need to go back 

to the lab and improve it in order for it to be ready or there’s really 

no customer who is interested in this so you—— 

Mr. WEBSTER. So the team could start all over with a new idea 

or a modified idea? 

Dr. TILBURY. They could absolutely start all over. It might—but 

rather than starting the company and investing a lot of money to 
51 

find out that we’ve developed this product that there’s no customer 

for, it’s better to determine that within this boot camp, the sixweek time frame. 

Mr. WEBSTER. I’m familiar with the University of Central Florida 

a little bit and their program there. It’s a pretty awesome thing, 

and they’re trying to train entrepreneurs, a great thing. 

Dr. TILBURY. Great. 

Mr. WEBSTER. I support it. By the way, they’re the only 

undefeated Division I football team in the country. I yield back. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Okay. And I now recognize Ms. Esty for 

five minutes. 

Ms. ESTY. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock and Ranking Member Lipinski. And I want to thank the four of you for joining us 

today on this really important topic, which I see as critical to U.S. 

competitiveness and to diversification of our STEM workforce, and 

those two things are related. So I want to say that I’m probably 

from Connecticut where accelerate UConn is in fact one of these 

nodes and is already proving to be incredibly successful. And in 

fact I was pulled out by our local contact from the Department of 

Commerce to talk about some of these issues and more things we 

need to do in our State to better link the world of work and the 

world of commerce, as Dr. Blank—Mr. Blank talked about, with 

what’s happening in the lab. 

So I wanted to—Mr. Blank, you talked about something that I 

think is really important for Americans to understand and frankly 

for a lot of my colleagues to understand the critical role that I– 

Corps is playing in that deep tech. I grew up sort of in the Silicon 

Valley area, and I think there’s still a lingering assumption here 

that that’s what’s happening now in Silicon Valley rather than the 

dramatic change that happened with the chase for unicorns and a 

fast turnaround so that without government support not only for 

basic research but government support and help to guide the scientists who are engaged in that deeper tech, so, for example, what 

intersects with DARPA, what intersects with other parts of the 

military. Could you expand on that a little bit? 

Mr. BLANK. Yes, Congresswoman. That’s in fact a great insight. 

You know, in the 20th century, venture capital, that is, investors 

in Silicon Valley and national interests actually were pretty well 

aligned. We invested in medical technology, we invested in computers, we invested in things that actually made the country better, safer, secure. In the 21st century they’re—I will contend 

they’re unaligned. Venture capitalists can make a ton more money 

than investing in short-term, you know, bitcoin investments or 

smartphone apps or social media, which are great for their investors, but one could argue that the money would be better spent on 

other things like genetic editing for healthcare or applications in 

other places. 

And this un-alignment has really created kind of a gap between 

what gets invested that requires patience and long-term vision. 

And in fact the few agencies in the country that do that, one of 

them is the National Science Foundation that invests in what we 

call deep tech that requires long-term investment and patience for 

basic materials science, basic health care at the NIH, et cetera. 

And I think this Innovation Corps program is part of that deep vi-
52 

sion, deep patience in the long-term investment that just private 

capital does not do anymore. 

Ms. ESTY. Thank you. I really appreciate that. 

Dr. Tilbury and Dr. Carter, you should know that actually Chairwoman Comstock and I earlier this year had bills signed into law 

Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act and really wanted to 

focus a little bit on the particular role and importance of something 

like I–Corps in diversifying our STEM workforce and ensuring—because we’ve found that women in the STEM fields and women generally are having more challenges making that leap into the entrepreneurial space, fewer mentors, less access to capital, and that I– 

Corps is actually playing a really important role. And, Dr. Carter, 

you talked about the difference that made in your own experience. 

Dr. Tilbury, could you expand a little bit more systematically of 

what we’ve learned because I think Dr. Carter’s testimony speaks 

to the reality of what it meant for her in getting that training? 

Dr. TILBURY. So absolutely. At the National Science Foundation 

we’re absolutely committed to broadening participation in all aspects of science and engineering and in particular in the I–Corps. 

So some of the pilot sites that we’ve started are focused on broadening participation. Some of them focused on including more 

women in startup companies; some of them focused on including 

underrepresented minorities or even people with disabilities. And 

they have unique vision into what the needs are for women, for disabled people that can really have an opportunity to create very successful companies. So we feel this is a good investment. It’s still a 

pilot, but we’re looking for good results to come out of these investments. 

Ms. ESTY. Dr. Carter? 

Dr. CARTER. Yes. You know, I mean, I will say that, you know, 

women are most—are generally attracted to solving problems that 

affect their communities, so I think this is a natural fit to bring 

women into the STEM fields and to get them included in our entrepreneurial ecosystem, so I see it—I mean, we’re trying to hit 50 

percent numbers in our programs for women entrepreneurs, and I 

anticipate that we’ll hit that. 

Ms. ESTY. Thank you. And the last thing I wanted to mention 

again, Mr. Blank, you talked about the hands-on entrepreneurship, 

and I think that is so critical. We’ve learned, for students, handson learning is the best. Hands-on science learning works better but 

that—taking that same insight and translating it into entrepreneurship I think is something we need to remember that I–Corps 

is championing, and we want to support you in any way we can in 

these endeavors. 

Thank you very much and I yield back. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. And I now recognize Mr. 

Marshall for five minutes. 

Mr. MARSHALL. Yes. Well, good morning. Kind of running back 

and forth between a couple committee meetings, as is usual for us, 

so thank you for your testimony, so proud of what the—what you 

all are doing. One of our jobs in Congress is always to figure out 

what’s working well and to reemphasize this, and I was able to 

take the Chairman of this Committee, Chairman Smith, to Wichita 

State University and share with him some of the things happening 
53 

on their innovation campus as well, so very proud to see how this 

is working. 

I would just like to hear a few more positive stories and give you 

all a chance just to share positive stories about how this is happening, and maybe just start with Dr. Tilbury and go down the 

line, you know a great real story that you would share. 

Dr. TILBURY. So I can tell you the story of one of my colleagues, 

Professor Awtar from the University of Michigan, mechanical engineering. So when he started as an assistant professor, he got his 

NSF career award, which is for junior faculty, and then he got another basic fundamental research award from the Engineering Directorate. And he developed a new way to kinematically re-map 

your hand movements into the edge—end of an end-effector for remote surgery purely mechanically, no electric controls required. 

So he got an I–Corps grant and started a company and then got 

an SBIR and built this company that’s building these medical devices, very low-cost, very safe, to be used in multiple dimensions. 

And now, I’ll be happy to say he’s back on campus and got another 

fundamental research award, and so we’ll see if he—now that this 

company is launched, we’ll see if he develops another new technology. We’re very excited. 

Mr. MARSHALL. Well, great. I keep telling everybody that innovation can do more to drive the cost of health care down than any 

piece of legislation we can write if the Federal Government would 

just get out of the way. 

Mr. Blank? 

Mr. BLANK. Yes, Congressman. I’m going to give you a story, 

probably one that doesn’t get told often, and that’s about failing 

fast. 

Mr. MARSHALL. Yes. 

Mr. BLANK. One of the great things about the I–Corps program 

is that it’s hard to avoid bad news because it’s in front of your face. 

Our best example is when we taught the class at UCSF, University 

of California at San Francisco, for life sciences the chief of surgery 

of UCSF said, ‘‘Well, I’ll set up a team, too, just so I can act as 

a role model for my students.’’ And he had an invention that he’d 

been working on for three years in the lab, hernia repair. And Dr. 

Hobart Harris said, ‘‘Well, this will be pretty easy. I’ll just get out 

of the building and I’ll talk to the other surgeons. I’ve been working 

on this for two or three years with my co-surgeons. Obviously, everybody will love this.’’ The third week of class he comes back and 

his face is pale. He said, ‘‘No one else wants it.’’ And in fact at the 

end of the class he said, ‘‘You know what, this isn’t a viable commercial technology.’’ And he still, four years after the class, is proselytizing the fact that not only can this help you build a company, 

it could also help you not waste years of your time and tens of millions of dollars of both government capital and private capital. 

Mr. MARSHALL. Thanks. Dr. Chang? 

Dr. CHANG. So I mentioned the bioengineering class earlier, but 

I’ll give another story that also ties into engineering so—but starts 

with research. There’s a professor named David Tilley in our 

School of Agriculture, really innovative research, and he went 

through an introductory—introduction to I–Corps program that we 

offered locally, saw, wow, this is how I can explore whether I can 
54 

apply my technology in the marketplace and with the national cohort in Texas. That was about a year ago. They’ve launched the 

company. They’ve since gotten follow-on funding from the Maryland State economic development agencies, so all the things you’d 

like to see. 

But the big sea change for him was also that he wanted to apply 

throughout his entire research portfolio and get his other colleagues in the School of Agriculture to also be looking for applications and applying at I–Corps. So he’s actually teaching this in his 

classes. He teaches a class now where he teaches I–Corps principles, and he’s applying for an NSF grant that is an interdisciplinary addressing—a grant addressing multiple areas from technology, but a big emphasis is training graduate students. A key 

part of his proposal is training our graduate students in these I– 

Corps principles so that they can learn these and take it forward 

as well. 

Mr. MARSHALL. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Carter? 

Dr. CARTER. Yes, I want to give an example of an undergraduate 

because we hadn’t heard very many undergraduate stories yet. And 

I’ve had students—my site just got funded like this year so it’s just 

started, but we did some pre-I–Corps classes and I had students 

through that, so I’ll show an example. One of them is this guy 

Sukh Singh who basically had a technology where he had—basically was taking kids’ handwriting, you know, when they were 4 or 

5, six years old and letting them convert that over to Java code, 

JavaScript. 

And he went through the program and realized that the really 

big need that was there was that teachers don’t know how to 

treat—teach computer programming, right? They have no concept 

of how to do that, especially at the, you know, younger ages. However, they had no problem teaching basic math, so what he was 

able to do is pivot his company in order to create a product that 

allowed students—teachers to teach their kids the basics of 

JavaScript programming through math—— 

Mr. MARSHALL. Yes. 

Dr. CARTER. —by having them do math work and having them 

create games and objects and artwork. And he was able to—with 

no money invested whatsoever, he’s expanded now to I think five 

or six schools in Santa Cruz bringing in $20–30,000 of revenue a 

month now to keep his company supported and is looking at growing nationally, and said he did this all just—— 

Mr. MARSHALL. Yes. 

Dr. CARTER. —bootstrapped. 

Mr. MARSHALL. Thanks for sharing your stories. 

Dr. CARTER. Yes. 

Mr. MARSHALL. I yield back. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. I now recognize Mr. Beyer 

for five minutes. 

Mr. BEYER. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you very much 

for introducing us all to this concept and its remarkable success. 

Dr. Tilbury, Peter Drucker, the famous business writer, said that 

‘‘Nothing happens until the sale is made.’’ I was impressed that 

this is—you point that this is about—more about market failure 

than technical failure, but it was also noted that you said that ‘‘The 
55 

entrepreneurial lead in that three-person team was typically a 

postdoctoral scholar with a deep commitment to investigating the 

commercial landscape.’’ I’m trying to think if I’ve ever known a 

postdoctoral scholar who knew anything about marketing, sales, 

service, or the like. Why is that a particularly good person to be 

the entrepreneurial lead? 

Dr. TILBURY. So thank you for your question. It’s usually a 

postdoc or a graduate student who’s deeply engaged in the technology, so there the person in the team that is most deeply understanding of the technology. The faculty advisor has the broader 

perspective of the technology, and then there’s an entrepreneurial 

mentor, the third person of this three-person team, and it’s the entrepreneurial mentor that will help the team understand what they 

need to do to make this technology a commercial success. But you 

need someone on the team who is willing to put in the 40, 60, 80- 

hour weeks to build the technology and get it out of the lab, make 

it ready for commercialization. 

Mr. BEYER. And, Mr. Blank, thank you very much for providing 

all the intellectual drive for this whole I–Corps movement. You 

said, ‘‘Part of the big thing is how to hire and build teams that 

know how to sell and market products.’’ That sounds like all of 

America or all business in general. How do you do that? 

Mr. BLANK. Well, I’m going to answer that, but I want to answer 

your first question. 

Mr. BEYER. They’re almost the same question. 

Mr. BLANK. Yes, but it’s really interesting because if you think 

about it, you go, wait a minute, why do we have to train those entrepreneurial leads to do this? They should just hire a V.P. of sales, 

and they take the tech and go out and sell it. And that’s not their 

skillset; it’s someone else’s skillset. And it turns out that’s where 

we went wrong. We went wrong because we assumed that just because they had an idea, you could now slap a salesperson on it and 

sell it. It turns out that almost always their initial idea of who to 

sell it to, how to package it up is almost always wrong. And the 

only people to figure out whether it’s wrong or right is not a salesperson; it’s actually the technologist themselves. And we’ve now 

learned that the initial people who go make the first sales and try 

to understand that are best done by the technologists. 

So it’s easier to train a technologist to understand customers 

than it is to train a salesperson to understand deep tech. That’s the 

big lightbulb. That’s the whole idea here is, wait a minute, let’s 

train the scientist. You know, with all due respect, business can be 

figured out quicker than you could figure out biotech or some of 

these arcane sciences. That’s the key idea about I–Corps. And in 

fact, once you train them that this is nothing more than testing 

guesses or hypotheses, that’s what they do in the lab all the time. 

I don’t know if I answered your question. 

Mr. BEYER. You did. You remind me that in—I’ve been selling for 

more than 40 years, and it was discouraging to realize that I knew 

all the math I needed to know by third grade to sell. 

Dr. Tilbury, Dr. Carter talked about she’d seen great diversity in 

the I–Corps teams themselves, but there is historically huge underrepresentation of women and minorities in startups. Silicon Valley 
56 

is legendary. So do you use this as a metric from the National 

Science Foundation how I–Corps is able to expand diversity? 

Dr. TILBURY. Thank you. As I mentioned earlier, NSF is absolutely committed to broadening participation in all aspects of 

science and engineering, including in I–Corps, and we have funded 

some pilot sites that are specifically targeted to increase the representation of women, underrepresented minorities, and people 

with disabilities in the entrepreneurial innovation ecosystem. 

Mr. BEYER. Very cool. And, Dr. Chang, who is not a Dean or is 

a Dean, you talked about pushing scientists to go beyond the comfort zone, which is once again the challenge for all of us in life. 

How hard has that been to get people who love to be in labs and 

think deep thoughts to get out there and talk to real people on the 

street? 

Dr. CHANG. It’s extremely challenging. I mean, you know, you 

can ask any university, the numbers will be about the same, but 

it’s a very small number of faculty who actually want to start a 

company. You know, maybe it’s five percent, maybe ten perhaps 

but—to actually start the company. But almost all faculty want to 

see what they’re doing have an impact. And one of the beauties of 

I–Corps—and Dr. Tilbury kind of talked about it with your question related to entrepreneurial lead is it doesn’t have to be the faculty member that takes this forward. The faculty member just has 

to be supportive of the efforts to explore where it can go forward. 

And so if you’ve got, as Congressman Lipinski mentioned, only 

half of Ph.D. students entering academic fields, what are the other 

half going to do? Well, if they can explore these opportunities to 

find out where can the sale be made, they aren’t actually necessarily tasked with the ones at the end of the day closing the sale, 

but if they can identify where the sales can be made and shape the 

direction of the technology development, I mean, some of our most 

successful I–Corps stories, they’re—they went through I–Corps 

three years ago because what they learned fundamentally changed 

not their core expertise but the direction that they were going to 

apply it. And it took a long time to build the technology. And you 

can imagine over three years being slightly off course where they’d 

end up three years later. 

So, you know, I think for faculty just kind of thinking about it 

may not be you, but your research is going to have a greater impact and you want to help your students find jobs, and if half of 

them aren’t going to be in academia, this is a great way to help 

your students find jobs. 

Mr. BEYER. Thank you very much. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. And I wanted to ask, do you 

have a percentage of women who are participating in the program? 

Dr. TILBURY. I don’t have that number at my fingertips, but I 

could get that for you. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Okay. Because I’d be interested in that 

and overall diversity, as well as what is done to recruit in particular to help those numbers, to get more in the pipeline because 

I know I’ve had a young woman’s leadership program that I’ve just 

run informally in the summer, and we’ve had to very aggressively 

recruit to make sure we are getting young women from different 

communities that maybe their parents aren’t saying, hey, why 
57 

don’t you do this. You know, and we’re reaching kids in junior high 

and high school, so we’re really trying to get them into a leadership 

program that opens up to some exposure for them to other women 

leaders and to ideas. But we really have to go into particular communities to kind of pull them out, and so I just would be interested 

in what methods you might use to enhance that and make sure 

that they are participating in a program like this. 

Dr. TILBURY. So thank you. I think that’s one of the purposes of 

these pilot sites that we have that are focused specifically on trying 

to increase the representation of women or minorities or disabled 

people in the entrepreneurship. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Right. 

Dr. TILBURY. So that’s their focus. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Good. 

Dr. TILBURY. And we’ll look forward to seeing their successes. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Okay. And it would just be helpful if we 

could get some of those numbers, too, because—and make sure— 

and best practices that might apply for us in other areas, so thank 

you. 

And I now recognize Mr. Banks for five minutes. 

Mr. BANKS. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thanks to each of you 

for being here. This has been an enlightening discussion for me, 

learning more about I–Corps. 

I wonder, though, to start with, Dr. Tilbury, as the curriculum 

has been developed and the program has been launched, how can 

the private sector invest more and take on more responsibility for 

sustaining the program? 

Dr. TILBURY. So thank you. I think there is an opportunity for 

the private sector. Many people who participate in the teams, the 

entrepreneurial mentors come from the private sector. Most of the 

programs are offered through universities, and some of them have 

partnerships with the private sector to fund those programs. So I 

think there’s many different opportunities. I don’t have a specific—— 

Mr. BANKS. So there are mechanisms for the private sector to invest their own funding? That can already occur? 

Dr. TILBURY. I think through the universities would be the way 

to go. Do you have another—— 

Dr. CHANG. I was just going to add, so the SBIR program, for instance, I–Corps has started to be used—actually not started—it’s 

been a couple years now it’s been incorporated into the SBIR phase 

1 awardees from NSF, and that’s been transformational for the program but also, as I understand it, there’s a phase 2B, a component 

of that SBIR program where not only do you get funding from NSF, 

but it’s a side-by-side investment with a private institution. So 

you’re sort of meeting halfway because the technology still needs 

to be developed and you’re kind of sharing that risk, and if it ends 

up where you think it will, now the private company that was a 

partner in that is going to go all in. 

Dr. CARTER. And I can tell you what we do. Our center—except— 

the NSF I–Corps site—our center is completely privately funded. 

We get donations from alumni and various people in the community who really want to see our students be successful and move 

forward. We also introduced something known as the founders’ 
58 

pledge, which basically allows—it’s no firm commitment but basically says if the students go off and do really well and make money 

that they will commit giving money back to the program that we 

can use to then support future students. So I see this being selfsupporting. 

Mr. BANKS. Mr. Blank? 

Mr. BLANK. And if I can, I should maybe circled this back to the 

intent of I–Corps Go. The current I–Corps NSF program funds universities and university nodes. The intent of I–Corps no is to take 

this—I–Corps Go is take this great curriculum and open it up to 

the larger community. And that would allow funding to go directly 

from private capital entities into these startups, which not necessarily would be deep tech. Remember, the NSF program is essentially for these orphaned technologies that have a hard time crossing this ditch of death between government basic science funding 

and private capital who wanted to see something more advanced. 

I–Corps Go would actually expand it to a much greater community 

with a proven curriculum that actually works well. 

Mr. BANKS. Okay. So, do you think, in light of that, do you think 

that startup companies would see value in spending their own capital, their own money, to go through the training if it were available to them? 

Dr. TILBURY. I’d say absolutely. That’s what Dr. Carter said. She 

would have paid for it. 

Dr. CARTER. I would have paid for it, yes, no problem. 

Mr. BANKS. Okay. So we all agree with that? Okay. Thank you. 

I yield back. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. And I now recognize Ms. 

Bonamici for five minutes. 

Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock, and thank 

you to the witnesses. I regret I was not able to hear you deliver 

your testimony. There’s an Education Committee happening at the 

same time, and I’m trying to be at more than one place at once. 

But I did read the testimony with interest. 

I represent northwest Oregon, and we have certainly a lot of tech 

startups and accelerators and a lot of incubators, and this is a really interesting topic to me. 

I wanted to start, Dr. Tilbury, you cited some data in your testimony about companies that were formed and then funding for 

teams that have been through the I–Corps curriculum. So what is 

the full extent of the data that you have on outcomes? Are there 

data that you’re in the process of collecting so that we could know 

what metrics we should be using for a full understanding of the return on investment in I–Corps? 

Dr. TILBURY. So thank you. There is absolutely a data collection 

ongoing. I believe through the AICA Act we have a biannual reporting to Congress, so sometime within a year—I think January 

of 2019. Correct. So we are collecting data as much as we can to 

understand. 

Many of the startups that are coming out of NSF-funded basic 

research are in this deep technology area that Mr. Blank mentioned, and they might take five or even ten years to show the results of their company. It’s not just writing software. You have to 

build something and maybe build a manufacturing plant to make 
59 

it. And so these timelines are much longer than you might expect 

to see in something that’s starting an app for a smartphone. 

Ms. BONAMICI. Of course. Right. Thank you. So to the whole 

panel, you know, our U.S. universities continue to lead the world 

in basic research and in education. I just want to note, as we’re in 

the midst of discussion about the tax reform bills that there are 

provisions that are of great concern to our universities, particularly 

the—treating tuition waivers has taxable income. Our universities 

are very, very concerned about that, and I hope that when the conference committee meets, they get the message that that’s going to 

set us back as a leader in innovation and research. 

In some cases, universities can be slow to change and adapt to 

emerging challenges and opportunities. I came from our state legislature and, you know, I know that some of that happens. So where 

do things stand now with respect to the sort of cultural and institutional obstacles to expanding the entrepreneurial culture at universities, and how has I–Corps helped, you know, model some of the 

changes that—even in the last few years where lessons could be 

learned at the university level and what steps can federal agencies 

and institutions themselves take to continue to expand entrepreneurship without compromising the critical mission in research and 

education? 

Mr. BLANK. If—— 

Ms. BONAMICI. I’ll start with Mr. Blank. 

Mr. BLANK. If I can, I think that’s a great question, and the insight I’ll offer with a smile is that in universities, I–Corps is typically offered in the engineering school, not the business school, 

which is a big idea. You know, one would have thought that business schools would have led with this type of entrepreneurial education, but in fact business schools historically have been focused 

on large corporations and the execution of a current business 

model, and that is how to make current corporations better. And 

so for 100 years that’s what business schools did. 

But this idea of innovation and entrepreneurship in the engineering school was actually a new idea, and in fact is kind of the breakthrough that’s happened in the last six years with I–Corps is that 

the engineering is actually now leading, the thought leaders in the 

country for innovation entrepreneurship. 

Dr. CHANG. Also I’d like to add to that. So what’s—my job at the 

University of Maryland five years ago—I was appointed by the 

President to aspirationally engage all 37,000 of our students in innovation entrepreneurship, and that’s an impossible task. But—— 

Ms. BONAMICI. But a good challenge. 

Dr. CHANG. But a good challenge. And I’ll say that the leans— 

or the I–Corps principles that we teach at startups, those are exactly the same methods and principles I’ve used in that mission. 

And that’s the only way to succeed because at the end of the day 

we teach our startups you have to figure out where people spend 

their time and their money and you need to go to where they are 

and offer a better solution in the way that they’re doing things because it’s hard to change behavior. That’s even more so at colleges 

and universities. 

And so the places where students are—let’s focus on the students 

for the moment—they’re taking general education courses. They’re 
60 

taking the prereqs for their major. They’re taking their required 

upper-level junior- and senior-level courses, so embedding it—and 

initially, whether it’s in engineering or even in other majors as 

we’ve started to do, embedding these kinds of methods and principles in those courses are the way to spread it because going and 

asking for more funding or more volunteers or more whatever is 

not going to get you as far. 

And the same thing is true on the faculty side, and faculty are 

motivated by getting tenure, they publish in journals, respected 

journals, and go to conferences, so we need to weave in innovation 

entrepreneurship into things they have to do along the path. 

Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you. And in my remaining few seconds I 

just want to mention that this Congress and the last Congress 

passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is the rewrite of No 

Child Left Behind, so at the K–12 level there are attempts being 

made to make sure that students get a more well-rounded education, and hopefully, we are educating before they get to college 

and universities, students to be more creative and innovative. 

And we’ve seen that in schools that, for example, are adopting 

STEAM rather than STEM and integrating the arts and making 

sure that people can think creatively and communicate about what 

they’re creating. So hopefully, when students get to colleges and 

universities, they will be more able to have that well-rounded approach and communicate what they are in fact inventing. So there 

are efforts to start earlier to make sure that we have a more creative and innovative workforce. 

So thank you, and I yield back the balance of my time. 

Chairwoman COMSTOCK. Thank you. And I thank our very esteemed and knowledgeable witnesses for their testimony, for your 

experience, for your wisdom and how we can really make this innovative field grow, so it’s very exciting and look forward to continuing to work with you. 

The record will remain open for two weeks for additional written 

comments and written questions from Members, and this hearing 

is now adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:31 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.] 
(61) 

Appendix I 

ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS
62 

ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS

Responses by Dr. Dawn Tilbury 
63 

2. Some experts have raised the 

Teams of$50,000 is the right 

Would it be possible to decrease 

budget for more teams, 

outcomes 

cohort 

for customer discovery 

month The 

level is appropriate 

NSF currently running 

developing different models 

intellectual and 

into national courses, 

~:The 

Zero l-CorpsTM 

allowance for 

allocated by teams? 

the 

participation and 

the funding 

2 
64 

Small Business Technology 

collaboration between the 

initial 

track 

NSF 

2019. 

4. NSF 

initiative is 

programs. 

plan to 
65 

HOUSE COMMITTEE SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

"From Lab to 

Dr. Dawn 

One of my goals 

our workforce. 

can 

Answer: In 2017, NSF Sites to 

participation and promote inclusion ofunden·epresented populations in 

approaches to 

and 

The NSF I-CorpsTM 

Disabilities 

of5 
66 

5 

anI-Corps Team 

brightest researchers test the 

!-Corps follows fixed model, so 

discussion of the need to 
67 

Responses by Mr. Steve Blank 

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON SCliENCE. AND TECHNOLOGY 

"From to 

Questions submitted by Representative Jacky Rosen. House Committee on Science. Space. and 

l. 

need to 
68 

Responses by Dr. Dean Chang 

HOUSE COMJ\1ITTEE SCliENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

"From Lab to 

Questions submitted bv Representative Jacky Rosen, Home Committee on Science, Space, and 

Technology 

I. 
69 

Responses by Dr. Sue Carter 

Æ 

HOUSE COMMITTEE AND TECHNOLOGY 

Lab 

Dr. Sue 

Questions submitted bv Representative Jacky Rosen, House Committee on Science. Space, and 

l. U.S. uni•versitie:; continue 

home 

need