Impact of an I-Corps Site Program on Engineering Students at a Large Southwestern University: Year 4

Per National Science Foundation, the I-Corps Sites program was launched to provide infrastructure, advice, resources, networking opportunities, entrepreneurship training and modest funding to enable research groups to transition their technology into the marketplace directly or into becoming an NSF I-Corps Team applicant. Furthermore, several of the close to 100 existing Sites include student participants working on student-owned intellectual property. We are currently operating on our fourth year of our I-Corps Site grant, which has supported eleven cohorts and more than one hundred teams. In previous work, we evaluated the change in perceptions associated with interest, confidence, and entrepreneurship, and lessons learned from practicing customer discovery (Lagoudas et al., 2019). In addition, we investigated the changes in the perceptions and the decision to GO/No GO with regards to student demographics and classification (undergraduate vs. graduate students) (Lagoudas et al., 2020). In this study, we will add to the findings of our previous work and include a focus on investigating the existence of any association between participant interest to utilize the lean launch methodology skills acquired as part of the Site program and their future career plans in relation to their prior experience in this area. Some of the research questions we are interested in include: 1) has the program increased interests of participants to seek opportunities in startups? 2) how does the program impact future research of participants; and 3) what are other ways that participants see benefits for their professional careers? We will utilize data from about 50 students who responded to open-ended questions on both pre- and post-surveys during 2018 to 2020. The findings of this investigation will add value to the existing body of research on the impact of the I-Corps Site programs.