Stanford University begins the Innovation Corps Program, an entrepreneurial education course funded entirely by the federal government, this September. The $10 million dollar grant for the program comes from the National Science Foundation and will fund five years of operation for the course, offered quarterly to twenty-five teams of three or more individuals.
The NSF is a government agency focused on research and education in all non-medical fields of science and engineering. Nearly 20% of all federally supported research projects taking place at United States colleges and universities are NSF-funded. The NSF provides grants to specific project proposals from the scientific research community. The review process is carried out by a panel of independent scientists and is done blind so as to avoid any potential conflicts of interest; 25% of proposals reviewed by the NSF receive funding.
The NSF’s goal in funding the Innovation Corps Program is to teach the nation’s leading scientists and engineers how to become entrepreneurs. In doing so, the program looks to create businesses that will grow and create jobs. The teams are selected by the NSF, and the program is only available to those who have an active science and engineering grant from the NSF. The class will focus on having teams create a business model. The model, as well as the product or service, will then be tested against the real world. The curriculum (found here) is modeled after a private incubation program called YCombinator. YCombinator, started in 2005, has provided the platform for startups that include Dropbox, Reddit.com, and Loopt. The course will be taught by entrepreneur Steve Blank, the professor of a similar course previously offered at Stanford, as well as, Stanford entrepreneurship professor Tom Byers and venture capitalist Jon Feiber. Blank believes “the process is eminently cloneable” and plans to establish programs and curriculums similar to his at other universities including UC Berkeley and Princeton.