Bay Area I-Node

Lester Center

Lester Center for Entrepreneurship
Receives Major National Science Foundation
Grant to Head Bay Area I-Node

February 25, 2013
Berkeley, California

The University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University are collaborating on an educational program aimed at commercializing university research and fostering innovation locally and nationally, thanks to a three-year, $3.75 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program is based on the Lean LaunchPad curriculum developed by Steve Blank at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and in Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program.

The “I-Corps Node: NSF Bay Area Regional I-Node Program” is one of three new Innovation Corps (or I-Corps) Nodes that the NSF is establishing across the United States, the NSF announced on February 21, 2013. The goal of I-Corps is to increase the impact of NSF-funded research by setting up innovation ecosystems within universities that will train the next generation of entrepreneurs, encourage partnerships between academia and industry, and commercialize science and technology. The resources of the program are available to NSF principal investigators and their graduate students, as well as local and national startups.

“The NSF has built an incredibly smart program to bring together the best of science and technology invention with all the advances we have made in teaching entrepreneurship over the past decade,” says node manager André Marquis. “Given our unique location within the national network for entrepreneurship, we have a great deal to bring to the I-Corps network.”

The node is headed by Richard Lyons, dean of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank, entrepreneurship lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford. André Marquis, executive director of the Haas School’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, serves the role of Node manager. They are joined by co-investigators Erik Lium, PhD, assistant vice chancellor of Innovation, Technology & Alliances at UCSF, and Riitta Katila, associate professor of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University.