NSF Entrepreneurial Fellowships for Increased Diversity and Impact

This effort seeks to lay the programmatic underpinnings for a larger-scale national entrepreneurial ecosystem to support and mentor scientists and engineers in their efforts to launch new high-impact ventures based on deep technology innovations. The project will directly empower a racially, geographically, and gender diverse set of new translational science and engineering leaders advancing cutting-edge technology innovations across sectors critical to economic security and competitiveness, including agriculture, buildings, chemicals, computing, defense, electricity, manufacturing, and transportation.

Success in this effort may validate a national model for developing and maintaining a strong translational research talent pool while advancing emerging industries, addressing critical societal and economic challenges, enhancing U.S. competitiveness and economic and national security, and enabling more participation from those who have been underrepresented in the science and engineering innovation enterprise. This initiative will also enable synergies with, and be strengthened by learnings from, flagship NSF translational programs including the NSF Lab-to-Market Platform comprising Partnerships for Innovation, Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer, and Innovation Corps.

The intellectual merit of this effort stems from piloting and evaluating three new critical approaches to increase access and further empower scientists and engineers across the nation. The first approach is the creation of a new modality for entrepreneurial support: a community of entrepreneurial fellows that allows any qualified scientist or engineer across the country to benefit from the core fellowship support and leverage the concentrated resources of traditional innovation centers without having to relocate to such centers.

The second approach is the creation of a new in-person community that would expand the existing model beyond the most established entrepreneurial ecosystems, a critical test toward ensuring that regional hubs can be created across the nation to support fellows in an in-residence format. The third approach is an initiative focused on increasing diversity in Scienece, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) entrepreneurship by supporting pre-doctoral scientists and engineers from traditionally underrepresented populations, exposing them to entrepreneurship and potential careers in technical innovation.

Taken together, these three initiatives seek to multiply the impact of a larger scale national entrepreneurial ecosystem, and provide key learnings that will allow continued scaling and even greater national impacts. Those who successfully complete the program will constitute the nation’s entrepreneurial leaders well into the future.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.