“Engineers, scientists, and financial analysts enter, innovation entrepreneurs emerge! The I-Corps mentors guide, but we also learn and grow as well. We feel like we are setting the tops spinning who will improve the world; and we are definitely having a lot of fun sharing what we love.”

“For someone with a technical background, the framing of business concepts in a scientific way made new concepts easy to learn quickly, and the program’s emphasis on conducting direct customer discovery really transformed the experience from a commercialization class; to real business development experience.”

“This program taught us the significance of customer discovery, user input, and market validation early in the product development process. Through meaningful interviews and lessons we have an informed commercialization path for our next phase of work.”

“The Venture Mentoring Network is able to tap into a very deep pool of capabilities and experiences in our mentors in order to accelerate the learning process for our NSF I-Corps teams. I find it very rewarding to see how the mentoring team works in a very collaborative fashion to increase the probability of success and shorten the time to market for our I Corps projects.”