UAF I-Corps Program Helps Early-Stage Innovators

June 6, 2022

Discovering the needs of your stakeholders and potential customers is an essential part of the early-stage entrepreneurial journey. Listening to their stories and evaluating how your value proposition aligns to their needs provides insights on how to bring your product to market. Center ICE runs a National Science Foundation-funded Innovation Corps (I-Corps) site program to provide training and support for Alaskan entrepreneurial teams on the customer discovery process.

Understanding the needs of the customer, stakeholder, or end-user is essential to evaluate the value of your solution to their specific pain points. At Center ICE, the NSF I-Corps site program accelerates academic research and startup business projects that are ready to move toward commercialization. The program provides training, access to a mentor network, and funding to support you and your team in their customer discovery process.

Please contact us at centerice@alaska.edu or pwwebley@alaska.edu to learn more about our I-Corps program. Participants learn how to move technology out of the lab, as well as business startup best practices. Your team will obtain customer feedback that will help launch your product/business or develop an evidence-based commercialization strategy.

Stay tuned for the next cohort coming in the summer of 2022. Below is a link to a YouTube video of an event from Techstars Startup Week Alaska 2021 that includes past I-Corps teams talking about the benefits that the program provided them and their customer discovery process.

 

YouTube Link: Learning from I-Corps teams on their customer discovery