300 Teams in Two Years

Posted on October 26, 2013 by steve blank

This is the start of the third year teaching teams of scientists (professors and their graduate students) in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps). This month we’ve crossed ~300 teams in the first two years through the program.

I-Corps is the  accelerator that helps scientists bridge the commercialization gap between their research in their labs and wide-scale commercial adoption and use.

I-Corps bridges the gap between public support of basic science and private capital funding of new commercial ventures. It’s a model for a government program that’s gotten the balance between public/private partnerships just right.

While a few of the I-Corps teams are in web/mobile/cloud, most are working on advanced technology projects that don’t make TechCrunch. You’re more likely to see their papers (in material science, robotics, diagnostics, medical devices, computer hardware, etc.) in Science or Nature. The program pays scientists $50,000 to attend the program and takes no equity.

Currently there are 11 U.S. universities teaching the Lean LaunchPad curriculum organized as I-Corps “nodes” across the U.S.  The nodes are now offering their own regional versions of the Lean LaunchPad class under I-Corps.

The NSF I-Corps uses everything we know about building Lean Startups and Evidence-based Entrepreneurship to connect innovation to entrepreneurship. It’s curriculum is built on a framework of business model design, customer development and agile engineering – and its emphasis on evidence, Lessons Learned versus demos, makes it the worlds most advanced accelerator. It’s success is measured not only by the technologies that leave the labs, but how many U.S. scientists and engineers we train as entrepreneurs and how many of them pass on their knowledge to students. I-Corps is our secret weapon to integrate American innovation and entrepreneurship into every U.S. university lab.

Every time I go to Washington and spend time at the National Science Foundation or National Institute of Health I’m reminded why the U.S. leads the world in support of basic and applied science.  It’s not just the money we pour into these programs (~$125 billion/year), but the people who have dedicated themselves to make the world a better place by advancing science and technology for the common good.

I thought it was worth sharing the progress report from the Bay Area (Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF) I-Corps node so you can see what just one of the nodes was accomplishing. Multiply this by the NSF regional nodes across the U.S. and you’ll have a feeling for the scale and breadth of the program.

If you can’t see the presentation above click here

Glad to a part of it.

Lessons Learned

  • The U.S. government has built an accelerator for scientists and engineers
  • It’s scaled across the U.S.
  • The program has taught ~300 teams
  • Balance between public/private partnerships

Listen to the podcast here Download the podcast here
BTW, NCIIA is offering other accelerators and incubators a class to learn how to build their own versions of I-Corps here.

Filed under: NSF (National Science Foundation), Science and Industrial Policy, Teaching | 7 Comments »

This Will Save Us Years – Lean LaunchPad for Life Science

Posted on October 11, 2013 by steve blank

We’re deep into week 2 of teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) this October at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists.

Part 1 of this post described the issues in the drug discovery. Part 2 covered medical devices and digital health. Part 3  described what we’re going to do about it.

This is post is a brief snapshot of our progress.

Vitruvian is one of the 28 teams in the class. The team members are:

  • Dr. Hobart Harris  Chief of  General Surgery, Vice-Chair of the Department of Surgery, and a Professor of Surgery at  UCSF. Dr. Harris is also a Principal Investigator in the UCSF Surgical Research Laboratory at San Francisco General Hospital.
  • Dr. David Young,  Professor of Plastic Surgery at UCSF. His area of expertise includes wound healing, microsurgery, and reconstruction after burns and trauma. His research interests include the molecular mechanisms of wound healing and the epidemiology and treatment of soft tissue infections.
  • Sarah Seegal is at One Medical Sarah is interested in increasing the quality and accessibility of healthcare services. Sarah worked with Breakthrough.com to connect individuals with professional therapists for online sessions.
  • Cindy Chang is a Enzymologist investigating novel enzymes involved in biofuel and chemical synthesis in microbes at LS9

Vitruvian’s first product, MyoSeal, promotes wound repair via biocompatible microparticles plus a fibrin tissue sealant that has been shown to prevent incisional hernias through enhanced wound healing.  The team believed that surgeons would embrace the product and pay thousands to use it.  In week 2 of the class 14 of their potential customers (surgeons) told the team otherwise.

Watch this 90 second clip and find out how the Lean LaunchPad class saved them years.

(If you can’t see the clip above click here.)

Lessons Learned

  • Get out of the building

Listen to the post here
Download the post here

Filed under: Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Life Sciences (NIH), NIH (National Institutes of Health), Teaching | 5 Comments »