The University’s first National Science Foundation Innovation Corps Sites cohort will begin Thursday, running for an eight-week period.

The NSF I-Corps is a national program founded by the NSF to carry “basic research out of the lab and help commercialize it,” said Jed Taylor, assistant director of the Technology Entrepeneur Center.

The NSF selected the University as one of three sites in July, along with the University of Akron and the University of California, San Diego.

The Sites program is a step below the NSF’s national program, Taylor said. It has a less rigorous curriculum, takes less time commitment and has fewer structured teams than the national program. The program is designed to prepare the University’s teams for applying to the national program.

“The I-Corps Site is where there is some preliminary work done, basically to prepare and give more opportunities for success within the I-Corps program,” said Lesley Millar, director of the Office of Technology Management.

Millar said the teams learn about what it’s like to be in a company by exploring management opportunities such as hiring employees, receiving funding and pitching ideas, as well as dealing with legal and financial requirements.

“In becoming part of this program, the teams gain feedback,” Millar said. “It allows them to begin to address some of the issues needed to be addressed, such as considering what is it that your market is, what is your product and who is interested in what you are doing.”

The teams will be learning how to validate market size, customer segment and their value proposition. They will also interact with potential customers and experiment to validate those three things, Taylor said.

“The biggest part of the I-Corps program is to get out of the lab and talk to potential customers while developing skills to contact people,” Taylor said. “During the first two weeks, their goal will be to get out and talk to up to five people in the industry — their potential customers.”

Taylor said the program provides the teams with workshops and entrepreneurship courses, as well as $3,000 to explore the commercialization of their products.

“The money ... would be made available to them to utilize services and travel to meet potential clients and go to meet with mentors or experts,” Millar said.

She said the Sites program is beneficial not only to the startup companies but to the University and the economy.

“The program gives the University another set of resources,” Millar said. “It gives ways to increase the chance of technology getting to the market, allowing companies to be successful and make revenues, grow bigger, get funding and essentially impact the economy around them.”

Laura Frerichs, director of Research Park, described the program as a “boot camp process.”

“About every ten weeks, we’ll be launching a new group. They will get good business advice, they will get training and they will be in a peer group of others that are in the same stage,” she said.

Frerichs said during the fall semester, there will be six teams that go through the eight-week program. Each team is composed of three people: one professor or faculty member, one graduate student who will likely be the first employee of the company and one business mentor.

The next cohort is scheduled to begin in October with ten to twelve teams, Taylor said.

Jacqui can be reached at ogrodni2@dailyillini.com.