I-Corps is the premiere federally funded innovation and commercialization program in the U.S., and has trained more than 800 teams at 192 universities in 44 states. It has helped form 320 companies and raise more than $83 million in follow-on funding. Six new federal agencies, including NIH, are now adopting I-Corps programs, because it works!

 

While acknowledging most scientists aren’t interested in becoming business people, the need to justify how federal dollars are spent isn’t restricted to the NIH, but gets passed along to grantees in the form of pressure to “increase the economic impact of the $30 billion in research dollars invested every year.” When scientists work on problems that are important to them, without checking if the problems are important to the community, they can waste precious resources creating solutions to problems that people don’t really care about. This is the “if you build it they will come” fallacy.  I-Corps represents a fundamental shift in thinking. In I-Corps, customers come first, and the #1 step is to develop a business thesis that answers three questions: who is your customer, what is your product, and why would they buy it?

 

The #1 myth that we as academic researchers believe is that real people are interested in our science.  They aren’t! People want their problems solved, their jobs done, their pain killed, and their dreams achieved.  A big mistake is building a prototype, protocol, or innovation before testing the assumption that people will actually find value in the solution.  By participating in I-Corps over a short three-week period, you will learn how to test your assumptions using the scientific process to learn about the potential "customers" of your research.