Rice University and its partners in an "innovation node" have been awarded another $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps program to add five more schools to their partnership.
Rice teamed up with the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University to establish the NSF Southwest I-Corps Node with a $3.75 million grant in 2014. Now, the new grant will create the Southwest I-Corps Hub, which will include the original team plus Oklahoma State University, New Mexico State University, Louisiana State University, the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Texas at El Paso.
The hub is one of five that have been newly awarded nationwide. Rice will receive $1.2 million over five years from the latest grant. To-date, the university received more than $3.1 million in NSF grants for the I-Corps program and about $1.3 million as part of the previous I-Corps Node.
“The NSF I-Corps program helps faculty, researchers and Ph.D. students in engineering and science evaluate the commercial potential of university-developed, STEM-based technologies,” Rice said in its announcement. "It also provides $50,000 grants for STEM-based Ph.D. students and faculty to participate in a six-week experiential and evidence-based training program to help researchers gain insight on customer needs, reducing the time it takes to bring technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace."
Since launching in 2011, the I-Corps program has supported the creation of 1,035 startups, which have gone on to raise more than $750 million in funding.
One of the Houston-based startups was Volumetric, which specializes in 3D bioprinting of replacement organs and tissue and was acquired by South Carolina-based 3D Systems Corp. (NYSE: DDD) last year. Another was Splay, formerly Arovia, which created the Spontaneous Pop-Up Display, a desktop-sized display that collapses like an umbrella for portability. The company participated in the Rice Business Plan Competition in 2016 and was the big winner of the 2018 Texas A&M New Ventures Competition hosted by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station.
The I-Corps campus at Rice is led by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship — specifically, Kerri Smith, associate managing director of the Rice Alliance; Kaz Karwowski, executive director of the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership; and Jessica Fleenor, Rice Alliance I-Corps teaching assistant and I-Corps program manager. They help applicants navigate the I-Corps grant process and support the I-Corps training program.
So far, faculty and researchers at Rice have earned $600,000 in grant funding for this program, which also helps support the commercialization of technologies out of Rice and Ph.D. students' entrepreneurial education, the release said.
“Thanks to the Rice Alliance’s more than two decades of leadership, Rice has built an entrepreneurial culture on campus, served as a founding member of the I-Corps program, and provided entrepreneurial education to hundreds of faculty and students,” said Reginald DesRoches, president of Rice University. “We look forward to expanding our I-Corps successes and commercialization with the launch of the new hub.”
