I-Corps™ for Learning: Sustaining and scaling STEM education innovations for impact

Currently there is a lot of emphasis on engineering education research and innovation. In 2014 NSF funded a pilot implementation of the NSF Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps™ L) and additional cohorts have been conducted and are planned. The 7-week I-Corps™ L program uses established strategies for start-ups to scale up and move teaching and learning innovations into broad practice. Participating teams go through a hypothesis-testing, scientific method of discovery to gather important insights and identify issues associated with their projects. Unfortunately, the reach of the program is limited as a maximum of 24 teams can participate in each course offering. This special session provides an opportunity for a broad cross-section of researchers and educators to gain exposure to the Lean Start Up approach and its applicability to STEM education ecosystem. The focus of the session is to introduce the core features of the Lean Start Up process: search for a sustainable and scalable model using the Business Model Canvas, Customer Discovery, and Agile Engineering (i.e., iterate and increment towards an appropriate 'product').