The Innovation Corps (I-Corps) South node at the Georgia Institute of Technology hosted a regional summit of 12 universities from the South centered on furthering and encouraging greater commercialization of ideas fostered in university labs and classrooms.
The daylong, April 25 summit, which included schools from North and South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia, was designed to allow the different schools to share best practices and lessons learned from ongoing initiatives and plan growth and development strategies.
“When we say innovation, we often only think of certain parts of the country,” Keith McGreggor, the I-Corps South node co-principal investigator and executive director, told the roughly two dozen attendees. “But there’s a lot of innovation and potential occurring here in Georgia and across the South and we want to continue to foster and develop that.”
The I-Corps program, a public-private partnership program established in 2011 by the National Science Foundation (NSF), connects NSF-funded scientific research with the technological, entrepreneurial, and business communities to help create a stronger national ecosystem for innovation that couples scientific discovery with technology development and societal needs.
The I-Corps South node, established in 2016, is a partnership of Georgia Tech, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama in Birmingham, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Haslam College of Business. I-Corps South works and partners with university students and research faculty at schools in 10 states from the South and the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico to teach entrepreneurship, support research and innovation. Through this collaboration, the node has the potential to reach more than 500,000 graduate and undergraduate students, and many thousands of the nation’s research faculty at research universities and historically black colleges and universities across the Southeast and Puerto Rico.
To entrepreneurs, I-Corps South seeks to provide consistent instruction on the principles of evidence-based entrepreneurship in the style of I-Corps. Instruction is direct and challenging, keeping in mind the goal of holding entrepreneurs accountable to know their customers. To universities, the node seeks to provide the tools, support, and resources required to launch and maintain high-quality evidence-based entrepreneurship programs across the southeast.
“I-Corps allows you to grow entrepreneurial ecosystems where the entrepreneurs are, at your schools and communities,” McGreggor said. “What we want to do today is share our ideas and explore opportunities to partner with each other to see how we can work together to further build and develop an entrepreneurial ecosystem of the South.”