In a grand test of whether the Silicon Valley startup accelerator model can help university scientists get promising new technologies to market faster, 21 teams hand-picked for the National Science Foundation’s new Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program converged on the Stanford University campus last week. The goal: to review the progress they’d made during an eight-week crash course in entrepreneurship, and share the details of their newly battle-tested business models with a panel of NSF leaders and venture capital partners.
I sat in for the first half of the review session, which took place Wednesday at Stanford’s School of Engineering, and listened to presentations on everything from hydrophobic materials for preventing ice buildup on airplane wings to a method for growing transparent sheets of graphene that could be used in next-generation computer displays. It’s too early to say how many of these innovations will turn up in the marketplace—but it was remarkable to see how thoroughly the traditional walls between academia and business had melted away in the minds of the program participants.
It all made for an event unlike any demo day I’ve seen before. The I-Corps teams—who hailed from Seattle, Tucson, Pittsburgh, Boston, and everywhere in between—were the antithesis of the hip, young, polished entrepreneurs you see coming out of venture incubators like Y Combinator or TechStars. Instead, these were geeks on a mission: bench scientists who are convinced that businesses can be built around the technologies they’ve invented, and who’ve decided to take the leap themselves rather than wait for a corporate licensee to wander along, as in the old model of university technology transfer.
For most of these scientists, the I-Corps program was their first real exposure to the startup mindset, and they had plenty of self-deprecating stories to share about the lessons they’d learned while talking with potential customers. One University of Connecticut team developing a nanocomposite material for explosives detection had pivoted not once but twice—from a landmine-detector product to an airport security product, then back to landmines. “The most important thing we learned from I-Corps is how important getting out of the building is,” principal investigator Yu Lei said.
It was no accident that that phrase—“getting out of the building”—came up in every presentation I saw. It’s practically been trademarked by Steve Blank, the serial entrepreneur famous around Silicon Valley for his “customer development” methodology, which says that the highest priority for any startup is to gather feedback from potential customers and continually refine its product or its target market or both until it finds a fit. NSF officials tapped Blank to lead the I-Corps program after watching him teach customer development to students in his “Lean LaunchPad” course at Stanford.
The teams chosen for the I-Corps program—each of which consisted of at least one principal investigator with a history of NSF grant-getting, one younger “entrepreneurial lead” (typically a graduate student or postdoc), and one business mentor—first came to Stanford in October for a few days of startup bootcamp. They were then sent home with instructions to get out, talk to customers, and, if necessary, throw out their original business models and start over. Last week’s session was both an opportunity to share what they’d learned and an audition for Phase II of the program, in which a few of the teams will be selected for NSF grants to help them continue their commercialization efforts.
How well did the teams adapt to customer-development thinking? “I think they hit it out of the park,” Blank told me at the review session.
The evidence was in the before-and-after “business model canvases” that each team shared during their presentations. An invention of strategy consultant Alexander Osterwalder, a business model canvas is a template that helps fledgling startup teams envision who their most natural customers are, how they’ll deliver value to those customers, and how they’ll manage costs, revenues, and partnerships. With help from mentors, and with feedback from the more than 2,000 prospective customers they interviewed during the eight-week program, the I-Corps teams redrew their canvases
