I-Corps

What is the Innovation Corps Program?

Training that helps you quickly assess an invention’s market potential through rapid, in-depth customer discovery. In a few weeks, entrepreneurs learn what makes their technology commercially valuable, how to find customers, and how to modify their inventions to meet those customers’ needs.

Program Benefits

  • Improved chance of commercial success
  • Slash the time to take technology from the drawing board to market
  • Increase entrepreneurial skills
  • Identify customers and weaknesses in business model in weeks, rather than months or years
  • Increased likelihood of attracting follow-on funding, such as a federal grant to validate and commercialize your invention

Applications

A short application is required for each program that will be evaluated on the following criteria:

  • Team and Commitment
  • Intellectual Property Strength
  • Technology Strength
  • Commercial Potential & Applications
  • Fit with I-Corps Sites

Applications will be accepted any time, and will be evaluated by the selection committee for admittance into the appropriate program.

Follow-On Resources

The goal of the program is to help LSU faculty, staff, and students commercialize their technologies and ideas. After completion of the program, several follow-on opportunities are available through the following:

  • NSF I-Corps Teams program, an intensive six-week National Science Foundation training with $50,000 grant
  • LSU Leveraging Innovation for Technology Transfer Program, LIFT2, prototyping grant of up to $50,000
  • LSU Innovation Park incubator
  • LSU Innovation business consultants' help applying for seed funding through the federal Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology transfer programs

Background

In January 2016, the National Science Foundation designated LSU an Innovation Corps site to educate faculty, students and the community on entrepreneurial principles. Our goal is to help faculty and students answer important commercialization questions directly applicable to state and federal grant programs, and to identify industry partners and potential licensees.

In September 2022, NSF named LSU as one of the lead organizations for a new regional I-Corps hub -- Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico -- that will help propel more research out university labs and into the real world. LSU is supporting communications for the four-state hub and offering I-Corps training throughout Louisiana.