DC I-Corps: Accelerate DC Venture Mentoring Service

In June, Ron Garnett signed on with the Accelerate DC Venture Mentoring Service managed by the Washington, DC Economic Partnership. Under the arrangement, Ron will provide new and emerging ventures with sustained guidance and advisory support. The program is an extension of DC I-Corps, a regional program designed to foster, grow and nurture an innovation ecosystem in the nation’s capital, the nearby states of Maryland and Virginia, and the mid-Atlantic region. The program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and jointly run by the University of Maryland College Park, George Washington University, and Virginia Tech. The program provides real world, hands-on training on how to successfully incorporate innovations into successful products. The ultimate goal is to create a new venture or licensing opportunity for program participants.

As a public-private partnership, the primary goal is to connect federally 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. Ron will work with DC I-Corps program participants and help them to develop scientific and engineering discoveries into useful technologies, products and processes.

“When it comes to translating public sector technology research into private sector innovation opportunities, a public-private partnership approach like DC I-Corps makes a lot of sense. Sharing real-world understanding of business models, market drivers, solution impact and value creation are essential to ensuring that these ventures have what it takes to be successful,” says Ron Garnett.

Ron joins other technology developers, business leaders, venture capitalists from private industry to share knowledge and experience with DC I-Corps awardees. The DC I-Corps program will initially support up to 100 projects per year, at $50,000 a project.

Over a period of six months, each I-Corps team, composed of the principal investigator, a mentor, and an entrepreneurial lead, will systematically identify and address knowledge gaps to ascertain the technology disposition: What resources will be required? What are the competing technologies? What value will this innovation add? The DC I-Corps program will also pilot innovative merit review processes through which promising discoveries emerging from federally-funded research projects will be identified quickly and efficiently for financial support as well as for mentorship through the national network.

About DC I-Corps

The intensive and highly experiential DC I-Corps program was developed by entrepreneurs and is taught by entrepreneurs. The program’s evidence-based methodology, drawing on decades of experience in Silicon Valley and featured in a Harvard Business Review cover story, emphasizes conducting hundreds of experiments, or interviews, with as many potential customers as possible; gaining insights about the significant pain points and needs of specific customers; and tracking the results of those experiments on a business model canvas. DC I-Corps teams – typically consisting of an academic researcher, a would-be entrepreneur and a mentor – can then create a startup company, obtain a patent, or license its technology to an existing company. The program also aims to foster a culture of entrepreneurship among university researchers and students by fundamentally changing the way they think about their future research and its applications. Learn more: http://www.dcicorps.org/

About Patriot Labs

Patriot Labs is committed to helping both innovative solution providers and enterprise customers succeed. For large enterprises, we dramatically accelerate delivery of industry innovations, nextgen technologies and transformational business solutions. For technology providers, we accelerate business development efforts, from market vision – to solution demonstration – to large customer acquisition.

Patriot Labs counts as clients many leading corporate enterprises, government agencies, research organizations, and emerging technology companies. Our technology development and deployment collaborations support a wide range of industries, including: education, energy, environment, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, pharma, transportation, and many more.