Innovation corps for learning: Evidence-based entrepreneurship™ to improve (STEM) education

The Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps-L) is a pilot initiative from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) to study whether the NSF I-Corps model can help to propagate and scale educational innovations. The NSF I-Corps guides teams based on established strategies for business start-ups, using Blank’s Lean LaunchPad and Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas and associated tools, to build entrepreneurial skills that will encourage mainstream application of their emerging technologies. The overriding goal is improving student learning and success rates in key STEM courses by helping to accelerate the process of bringing effective educational innovations to scale. The project goal of I-Corps-L is to investigate the potential of the I-Corps model for fostering an entrepreneurial mindset within the education community to impact the way innovations are designed and implemented. This Work in Progress describes the features of the I-Corps-L pilot and provides preliminary indications of its applicability for propagating, scaling and sustaining education innovations. Addressing the persistent challenge in STEM education to adopt evidence-based instructional practices is an urgent need as many approaches have been tried yet the rate and extent of adoption are very low. Keywords—I-Corps, innovation, scalability, sustainability