New funding will establish a Northwest Region Hub for innovation training
The University of Washington (UW) is one of eight universities to receive a National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps Hub grant, which provides $15M, spread across the institutions over five years, to bolster their innovation training programs. The grant will be administered by CoMotion, UW’s collaborative innovation hub and training center.
The new Northwest Region Hub (NWR) is one of three grantees this cycle and joins 10 existing regional I-Corps Hubs. NWR institutions will focus specifically on medical tech, agricultural and food tech, blue tech, and energy, environment, and cleantech. UW’s partners include lead institution University of California – Berkeley as well as the University of Alaska – Fairbanks, Oregon State University, and the University of California campuses in Davis, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Irvine.
These funds will support I-Corps at UW, CoMotion’s signature innovation training program and customer discovery workshop. The program involves weekly instruction, customer discovery interviews, practice pitches, office hours, and mentorship, with the goal of positioning teams for further development and fundraising and driving economic impact across a richly diverse region. Created in 2012, the national program has trained 2,500+ teams, more than half of which have launched startups that have cumulatively raised more than $3B.
“The Northwest Region I-Corps Hub is a game-changer for our academic innovation ecosystem,” said François Baneyx, UW’s Vice Provost for Innovation and the grant’s PI. “We are excited about building synergies between institutions with complementary strengths and transmuting our diversity of thought into companies that improve people’s lives and drive prosperity.
“It’s exciting for the UW to be a part of this Hub, drawing on its strengths in engineering and other STEM fields to drive innovation,” said Nancy Allbritton, dean of the UW College of Engineering and the grant’s faculty lead. “We plan to leverage each of our university partners’ existing innovation programs and ecosystems to grow tech ventures across the region.”
“These universities have strong legacies as incubators for great American innovations,” said Soraya Bailey, director of innovation training at CoMotion and the Hub’s UW director. “As a Hub partner, UW will expand its strong commitment to recruiting and training 60-70 teams per year and sending many to the national I-Corps program for further training and follow-on funding.”