[House Hearing, 115 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
FROM LAB TO MARKET:
A REVIEW OF NSF INNOVATION CORPS
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
DECEMBER 6, 2017
__________
Serial No. 115-40
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
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COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas, Chair
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
DANA ROHRABACHER, California ZOE LOFGREN, California
MO BROOKS, Alabama DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon
BILL POSEY, Florida AMI BERA, California
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut
JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma MARC A. VEASEY, Texas
RANDY K. WEBER, Texas DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia
STEPHEN KNIGHT, California JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
BRIAN BABIN, Texas JERRY McNERNEY, California
BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado
BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia PAUL TONKO, New York
RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana BILL FOSTER, Illinois
DRAIN LaHOOD, Illinois MARK TAKANO, California
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida COLLEEN HANABUSA, Hawaii
JIM BANKS, Indiana CHARLIE CRIST, Florida
ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas
NEAL P. DUNN, Florida
CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana
RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
------
Subcommittee on Research and Technology
HON. BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia, Chair
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut
STEPHEN KNIGHT, California JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
DARIN LaHOOD, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon
RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana AMI BERA, California
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia
JIM BANKS, Indiana EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas
C O N T E N T S
December 6, 2017
Page
Witness List..................................................... 2
Hearing Charter.................................................. 3
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Barbara Comstock, Chairwoman,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 4
Written Statement............................................ 5
Statement by Representative Daniel Lipinski, Ranking Member,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 7
Written Statement............................................ 9
Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking
Member, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House
of Representatives 11
Written Statement............................................ 12
Witnesses:
Dr. Dawn Tilbury, Assistant Director, Directorate for
Engineering, National Science Foundation
Oral Statement............................................... 14
Written Statement............................................ 16
Mr. Steve Blank, Adjunct Professor, Management Science and
Engineering, Stanford University
Oral Statement............................................... 23
Written Statement............................................ 25
Dr. Dean Chang, Associate Vice President, Innovation and
Entrepreneurship, University of Maryland; Lead Principal
Investigator, DC I-Corps Regional Node
Oral Statement............................................... 32
Written Statement............................................ 35
Dr. Sue Carter, Professor, Department of Physics, Director,
Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development,
University of California, Santa Cruz
Oral Statement............................................... 39
Written Statement............................................ 42
Discussion....................................................... 46
Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Dr. Dawn Tilbury, Assistant Director, Directorate for
Engineering, National Science Foundation....................... 62
Dr. Dean Chang, Associate Vice President, Innovation and
Entrepreneurship, University of Maryland; Lead Principal
Investigator, DC I-Corps Regional Node......................... 67
Dr. Dean Chang, Associate Vice President, Innovation and
Entrepreneurship, University of Maryland; Lead Principal
Investigator, DC I-Corps Regional Node......................... 68
Dr. Sue Carter, Professor, Department of Physics, Director,
Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development,
University of California, Santa Cruz........................... 69
FROM LAB TO MARKET:
A REVIEW OF NSF INNOVATION CORPS
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Wednesday, December 6, 2017
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
Washington, D.C.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:07 a.m., in
Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Barbara
Comstock [Chairwoman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
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Chairwoman Comstock. The Committee on Science, Space, and
Technology will come to order. Without objection, the Chair is
authorized to declare recesses of the Committee at any time.
Good morning, and welcome to today's hearing entitled
``From Lab to Market: A Review of NSF Innovation Corps,'' I-
Corps. I now recognize myself for five minutes for an opening
statement.
The purpose of today's hearing is to review the National
Science Foundation's I-Corps program and its goals of preparing
scientists and engineers to extend their research from lab to
market. The hearing will examine the successes and challenges
of the I-Corps program, and the Committee will hear
recommendations for the future of I-Corps and its role in the
innovation ecosystem.
In research labs today are the seeds for breakthroughs in
new fields like quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and
bioengineering, breakthroughs that will continue to transform
our lives and the world we live in. Many scientists and
engineers are not trained for commercializing those ideas
because most did not go to business school or take any business
development classes as part of their training. So how do we
give them the tools to be successful entrepreneurs? How do we
help scientists and engineers turn their innovations into
products and services?
In 2011, NSF established I-Corps to help fill that need. I-
Corps is a National Innovation Network of eight nodes across
the country, which connect academic researchers with the
private sector and trains them to be entrepreneurs. NSF funds
teams of researchers to go through a seven-week I-Corps
curriculum that provides a real-world, hands-on, immersive
learning experience. Today, I-Corps is taught at 86 colleges
and universities in the United States, and over 1,000 teams
have been through the program.
I welcome Dr. Dawn Tilbury, the new Assistant Director for
Engineering at NSF, to discuss what NSF has learned from over
five years of running the program and collecting data and
information.
We are also fortunate to have Mr. Steve Blank on the panel,
the architect of the NSF I-Corps curriculum. He will explain
how his approach trains scientists and engineers to be
entrepreneurs in a short period of time, and his vision for the
future of I-Corps.
We also have on the panel Dr. Dean Chang from the DC. Area
I-Corps node to discuss the innovation ecosystem in the
Virginia, Maryland, and DC. region. The 10th District--the 10th
Congressional District which I represent has a robust and
growing technology sector, while Virginia, D.C., and Maryland
boast some of the top research universities in the country. I
look forward to learning how I-Corps contributes to building
connections between academic researchers and the private sector
to create more companies and more jobs.
Finally, I look forward to hearing from Dr. Sue Carter on
her experience participating in three I-Corps teams and
creating successful companies.
Through research and activities like I-Corps supported by
NSF, we have the opportunity to boost our economy, enhance our
national security, strengthen our cybersecurity infrastructure,
and create a STEM-job-ready workforce, not a small task, and we
appreciate your role in all of that.
[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Comstock follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. And I now recognize the Ranking
Member, the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Lipinski, for his
opening statement.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock, for--and
Chairman Smith for holding this hearing. It's a hearing that I
have been wanting to have for a number of years. I'm glad that
we've got here. And as everyone knows, I've spent a lot of time
on this committee talking about the Innovation Corps or I-
Corps, so I'm very pleased to be holding this hearing, the
first one we had since we had a field hearing in Chicago back
in 2012 on I-Corps.
I'd like to think the 2012 hearing helped to win over some
of my more skeptical colleagues at that time. The program was
in infancy back then in the summer of 2012, having been
launched by NSF in 2011. Now, we are seven years in and the
program has not just grown and expanded at NSF, it has been
adopted and adapted by several other agencies including NIH,
DOE, and even DOD.
While I help to build support in Congress to see I-Corps
funded and expanded, agency, university, and national lab
leaders alike embraced the potential and worked hard to
implement it as effectively as possible. As a result, we are
starting to see exactly the kind of outcomes that we hoped for
back in 2012. Over 1,000 companies have completed a national I-
Corps course, and we're seeing many of the alumni go on to
start successful businesses.
There are some notable research institutions who started
creating a culture of entrepreneurship decades ago such as MIT
and Stanford. There are many more universities both public and
private that have actively sought to learn from and implement
many of the best practices from those pioneering universities.
Unfortunately, many of them have had a hard time securing the
funding and the right expertise to successfully undertake these
efforts. There are also some institutions of higher learning
that have simply not made this a priority. We know that
institutional culture is a hard thing to overcome.
Our world-class research institutions around the Nation
excel at conducting cutting-edge research and educating the
next generation of scientists and engineers. There is fear
among some that promoting entrepreneurship would compromise the
important basic research mission of the institutions. I believe
there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. It is clear that
students and faculty across the country are eager to see the
research breakthroughs further developed into commercial
products and processes for the benefit of society and our
economy.
In addition, because we now graduate far more Ph.D.'s than
we have faculty jobs, entrepreneurship provides a viable career
option for the more than 50 percent of Ph.D.'s who will not be
able to pursue academic careers.
With a very modest investment, I-Corps helps address the
lack of funding from the private sector to develop
entrepreneurial capacity at institutions of all sizes and
types. It also helps to strengthen the SBIR program, shift
institutional culture, and ultimately pay the American
taxpayers back many times over in the form of commercialized
products that would otherwise collected dust on a laboratory
shelf.
By the end of an I-Corps course, participants make the go/
no-go decision. Those that decide to go or to start a company
have some market research to back up their decision. And those
that either pivot to a new idea or choose no-go save themselves
the effort of starting a company that would have been likely to
fail.
Just a few examples of companies that have developed from
teams that participated in I-Corps training at the University
of Chicago in recent years are Conduit, a company that speeds
up the development and improves the quality of software for
Internet of Things devices; Qualia Health, which makes a health
assessment and monitoring app; and ClostraBio, which is
developing therapeutics to combat food allergies. These
companies are all making very real contributions to our
economy, job market, and well-being, and these are only from
one site out of many around the country.
I remain a committed champion of this program and never
cease to be amazed by how successful it has been and continues
to be, but we can't rely on past successes to keep I-Corps
strong into the future, so I plan to introduce new legislation
very soon to expand upon the I-Corps authorities already in
law. My bill, the Innovators to Entrepreneurs Act, will open up
I-Corps courses to participation by many more entrepreneurs
than are currently taking advantage of them. Currently, the
nodes that teach these courses are operating below capacity,
which is a missed opportunity both for their faculty and for
the companies that could be taking advantage of their training.
My bill will also direct NSF to offer a new course that goes
beyond the current I-Corps curriculum to focus on how to
attract investors and grow a business.
Since 2011, we have learned that the I-Corps curriculum
does a great job of teaching aspiring entrepreneurs how to do
customer discovery and vet their ideas, but once they decide to
start a company and begin the commercialization process, it
doesn't teach them how to take the next steps like how to
develop financial projections and build a winning team.
Some of the same visionaries who developed the current I-
Corps curriculum recognize this need and developed a new pilot
course they've been calling I-Corps Go. The results so far have
been promising, and demand for this type of training is high.
Therefore, my bill directs NSF to develop I-Corps Go into an
official I-Corps course and to offer it nationally to
interested companies through the nodes that offer the current
curriculum. I hope my colleagues will take a look at my bill
and agree to cosponsor it.
I also want to make sure that I mention the great job that
NSF has done with I-Corps over these years and the work that
they continue to do, and I want to welcome Dr. Tilbury in as
leading the Engineering Directorate, so it's good to have you
there at NSF in this position. I look forward to our discussion
and yield back.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lipinski follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize Ms.
Johnson for her opening statement.
Ms. Johnson. Thank you very much, Chairwoman Comstock, and
good morning. I appreciate you holding for this hearing, and
thank you for the expert witnesses for being here this morning
to share their insights with us.
The research carried out at our nation's universities and
national laboratories creates the foundation upon which our
entire innovation economy is built. However, in order to
benefit society, the science must find a way out of the
laboratory. These societal benefits may be varied. Science
itself across all fields serves as inspiration for the public
and a tool for educating the next generation of scientists and
engineers.
Science can also be used to strengthen our national
security or to inform better and more effective policies for
the public good. However, sometimes a scientific development
holds the promise of new commercial products or process and
that is where the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps,
or I-Corps, programs have the biggest role to play.
Unfortunately, the path from the laboratory to the market
has rarely been smooth or easy. While the challenges are
sometimes technical, they often are cultural and financial.
Scientists and engineers trained to be academics speak a very
different language than business people. Too often, as we will
hear in today's testimony, this leads to researchers spending
extensive time and money developing technologies that nobody
wants to buy. Even when the idea has a well-defined customer,
the private sector may be unwilling to invest until the concept
is more fully developed.
Over the last several years, the National Science
Foundation has been a leader in addressing the cultural
barriers impeding commercialization while also making small
investments in the proof-of-concept work. The I-Corps program
stands out as an example of the excellent return we can achieve
on a modest investment when we implement and scale-up proven
practices.
The--when NSF launched I-Corps in 2011, some of my
colleagues were skeptical about the need or the appropriateness
of having this program at NSF. Many in the university community
were concerned that the program might harm NSF's core research
mission. I believe there has been a sea change in the response
from the university community that reflects the pent-up demand
from researchers, the dedication of NSF staff, and the clear
benefits of this program. So as a result, this is one little
program that may be helping to transform the entrepreneurial
culture at universities well beyond their initial expectations.
I hope my colleagues also see the benefit of this program
and remain committed to supporting it, and I hope my colleagues
also remain committed to supporting the long-term foundation of
U.S. science and technology by continuing to invest in our
research agencies, including NSF. I look forward to today's
discussion, and I yield back the balance of my time.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. I'll now introduce our
witnesses today. Our first witness is Dr. Dawn Tilbury,
Assistant Director for the Directorate for Engineering at NSF.
She joined NSF in June while maintaining her appointment as
professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the
University of Michigan. A professor at Michigan since 1995, her
research interest is in the area of control systems, including
applications to robotics and manufacturing systems. She
received a Bachelor's of Science degree in Electrical
Engineering from the University of Minnesota, as well as a
Master's of Science and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences from the University of California Berkeley.
Mr. Steve Blank, I now recognize Mr. Lipinski to introduce
his--this witness.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. Steve Blank is an adjunct
professor at Stanford University, a lecturer at the University
of California at Berkeley, and a senior fellow at Columbia
University, but he is perhaps better known as one of the
godfathers of Silicon Valley for his prolific blog and books on
innovation, entrepreneurialism, and how to run a startup,
including The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup
Owner's Manual. Going back a second to the blog SteveBlank.com,
I recommend The Secret History of Silicon Valley for everyone
to take a look at the role that the government played in really
creating Silicon Valley that a lot of people don't know about.
Steve has won numerous awards, including honors for his
teaching at Stanford and Berkeley and appears on a Thinkers50
list of the world's top management thinkers for several years
running.
Steve helped develop I-Corps, drawing on the principles of
the Lean Startup movement, which he helped launch in Silicon
Valley. He has since started other innovation and
entrepreneurship programs, including Hacking for Defense, which
was federally authorized in fiscal year 2018 NDAA bill and
works to solve urgent problems for the Department of Defense
and intelligence community.
Through his work with the armed services intelligence
agencies he has helped advance the concept of dual-use
products, those that may be developed for defense applications
but can also be sold commercially and attract private capital.
Steve hails from Pescadero, California. It's good to have
him here today.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you.
And now our next witness is Dr. Dean Chang, Associate Vice
President for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University
of Maryland and Lead Principal Investigator of DC. I-Corps.
Prior to joining UMD, Dr. Chang spent 15 years in Silicon
Valley where he served as the Chief Technology Officer of
Immersion Corporation. He holds over 40 U.S. and international
patents.
Dr. Chang earned his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical
Engineering from MIT, a Master's in Business Administration
from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and
his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford.
Dr. Sue Carter is our final witness, and she is professor
of physics and Director of the Center for entrepreneurship at
the University of California Santa Cruz. She also serves as the
Director of the NSF I-Corps site in Santa Cruz.
Previously, she worked as a research staff member at
several companies and served as the Chief Technical Advisor and
scientific founder at four startups. Dr. Carter holds six
patents and one patent pending. Her research focuses on film
technologies, biosensors, solar energy, and agriculture
technology.
Dr. Carter earned a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics,
Chemistry, and Physics from Kalamazoo College and a Ph.D. in
Chemistry from the University of Chicago.
I now recognize Dr. Tilbury for five minutes to present her
testimony.
TESTIMONY OF DR. DAWN TILBURY,
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR,
DIRECTORATE FOR ENGINEERING,
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Dr. Tilbury. Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski,
and Ranking Member Johnson, Members of the Subcommittee, thank
you for inviting me to participate in today's hearing on the
National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps or I-Corps. My
name is Dawn Tilbury, and as mentioned, I'm the Assistant
Director for Engineering at NSF.
The NSF I-Corps program started through the convergence of
several trends in the economy in the understanding of startup
formation and through NSF's experience with seeding startups
through the SBIR and STTR programs.
I-Corps was adapted from Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad
course at Stanford University. Steve's course provided Lean
Startup training to NSF scientists and engineers so they could
quickly determine whether their technology or product had
commercial potential. I'm very pleased to see Steve here today.
Thank you for your leadership and support of this important
program.
I'm also pleased to see Dr. Dean Chang from the University
of Maryland, D.C., and Virginia node and Dr. Sue Carter from
the University of California Santa Cruz. You'll hear from them
shortly.
The purpose of I-Corps is to accelerate U.S. innovation. It
leverages results from fundamental science and engineering
research into translational activities of potential commercial
and societal benefit. I-Corps helps scientists and engineers
gain entrepreneurial skills and identify valuable product
opportunities that can emerge from academic research.
Each I-Corps team has a technical lead, an entrepreneurial
lead, and an I-Corps mentor. During their intensive training,
the I-Corps teams determine whether they have a viable product
or service with a fit in the market. At the end of the
training, if the answer is yes, teams have a clear
understanding of the next steps to move their technology into
the marketplace. Those steps could be to pursue licensing their
technology or to launch a startup.
By addressing the challenges inherent to the early stages
of the innovation process, NSF investments strategically
strengthen the innovation ecosystem in the United States. To
help accomplish this, we draw on many partners in that
ecosystem. Academic institutions play a critical role in I-
Corps, as does the private sector. Technology developers,
business leaders, venture capitalists, and experienced
entrepreneurs serve as mentors, sharing their knowledge and
expertise with the I-Corps teams. This network enhances the
ability of NSF-supported researchers and their students to turn
scientific results into potentially successful technologies.
Since our first cohort of 21 teams in 2011, the program has
expanded across the country. I-Corps now has eight regional
nodes involving 28 universities and 86 sites that provide
infrastructure, resources, networking, and training to move
scientific discoveries from university labs into the
marketplace. The I-Corps model has been adopted by nine other
federal agencies and the State of Ohio. The national I-Corps
curriculum has trained more than 1,000 teams to date. More than
450 of these NSF I-Corps teams have created startups.
Although I-Corps constitutes far less than one percent of
the NSF annual budget, recent data shows that I-Corps teams
have collectively raised over $250 million in seed capital. For
the team members, it has been truly transformational to think
in a more entrepreneurial way.
I-Corps is a way to unlock the economic potential of
creative ideas in American colleges and universities generated
by NSF investments. To lay the groundwork for future expansion,
NSF has two pilot programs underway. First, we are funding
eight I-Corps sites to increase participation and promote
inclusion of underrepresented populations in entrepreneurship.
These sites will pilot novel approaches and partnerships to
engage differently abled individuals, first-generation college
students, racial and ethnic minorities, and women, as well as
minorities-serving institutions.
Second, in collaboration with the NSF, SBIR, and STTR
programs, we launched the I-Corps for Phase Zero pilot. This
pilot supports nonacademic teams that are developing game-
changing technologies. The Phase Zero teams receive national I-
Corps training and participate in a follow-on curriculum called
I-Corps Go that addresses some of the more common issues in
startup formation.
As we look to I-Corps' next five years, we see continued
urgency and motivation for the program. Several studies suggest
that U.S. startup rates have not fully recovered from the Great
Recession. With NSF-supported researchers continually creating
and developing cutting-edge technology, we see the I-Corps
program as a key tool to help with our broader goals to
increase American innovation.
Thank you for your interest in this program and for giving
me the opportunity to speak. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Tilbury follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And now, we'll hear from
Mr. Blank.
TESTIMONY OF MR. STEVE BLANK,
ADJUNCT PROFESSOR,
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING,
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Mr. Blank. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock, and thank you,
Ranking Member Lipinski and Ranking Member Johnson. Thank you
for inviting me to participate in this hearing.
Six years ago, the NSF recognized that scientists who
received government commercialization grants were having a real
hard time getting to the next step of raising private capital.
And so the genesis of this I-Corps program is pretty simple.
First, figure out why this was. Why were scientists having a
hard time getting private capital, and why are they having a
hard time building successful companies? And once we figured it
out, then can we teach them the skills that they were missing?
And it soon became apparent that they were having a hard
time raising money is that the scientists simply couldn't speak
the language of private capital investors. University
scientists believe that just having innovative technology was
enough to make a successful business. The reality is that's
just plain wrong. Great technology is just one part of a
successful company. Private investors, venture capitalists, and
angel investors needed to hear more than just the technology.
To speak to VCs or angel investors, scientists needed to
learn things that weren't in their Ph.D. program. They needed
to figure out how to turn their innovations in the lab into
product that people actually wanted to buy. They had to figure
out who their customers were going to be and how the product
would be sold. They needed to talk to regulators and understand
patents and licensing issues and understand how to create
customer demand. How much would it cost to make their product
and how many would they sell and what price?
In the past, when a scientist started a company, they'd
write up all these answers to these questions, put it in a
business plan, hire the people, build the product, and only
find out years later into the company that their assumptions,
their guesses what the customer wanted were wrong.
Now, I-Corps starts with the premise that, on day one, all
an entrepreneur has is a series of untested hypotheses, which
is a fancy word for they're just guessing, about each part of
their business. We teach I-Corps in a way that's pretty
extraordinary. When we teach scientists all the theory about
starting a company, we also make them get their hands dirty by
having them get out of their labs and test their hypothesis by
talking to 10 to 15 customers a week. And they use the feedback
from those customers to improve multiple versions of their
product. By the time the class is over they've talked to over
100 people. We now know the I-Corps method of teaching
scientists to get out of the building and talk to people turns
theorists into capitalists.
And our scientists actually love this I-Corps learning
process because what they're doing is actually running the
scientific method, this time with potential customers rather
than test tubes in a lab. So when you hear the phrase ``I-Corps
is a bridge to private capital,'' you know that means that we
teach our best scientists to learn a new set of skills that
help them raise money to build companies. And these are
companies that could create not just new products but new jobs,
and not just in Silicon Valley but in districts like yours.
Now, having spent 21 years building companies, my first
instinct was this type of education should be done by existing
private incubators and accelerators, not the government.
However, our observation six years ago is still true today.
While the NSF-funded technologies can turn into future
companies, most don't fit the model of grow into a billion-
dollar valuation in three years that private incubators and
accelerators are looking for.
The teams that I-Corps teaches require the patience and the
long-term vision that the NSF brings. NSF-funded scientists and
engineers are working on what we call deep tech, really long-
term, geeky technology like new material, new devices outside
of the mainstream of social media and smartphone apps. Yet for
our country, turning these innovations in a products might have
the biggest payoff.
We now know that, without I-Corps training, most of our
advanced technologies would never turn into companies. There's
one other thing about these deep technologies that's becoming
more evident. Many are potentially dual-use technologies,
meaning they have potential commercial companies, but their
products can be also used for the Department of Defense and our
intelligence community to keep our country safe and secure.
So America is better for having I-Corps. It's made turning
our government-funded science into companies more efficient. We
should do more of I-Corps. We can make it broader and better,
reaching more people and teaching more skills. First, keep in
mind that, today, I-Corps is for university scientists funded
by the NSF, but if you're outside a university, you can't take
this class, and that's a shame. Since we now know we have an
effective program, we ought to share it with all Americans, not
just the few in universities. We ought to open the I-Corps to
innovators and entrepreneurs who have ideas in every part of
the country whether they're in a university or a garage that
aren't yet ready for private capital.
The second way to make I-Corps better is to improve on what
we've learned over the last six years. One of our biggest
learnings is that even after teams have been through the I-
Corps, they need to learn additional skills like how to hire
and build teams that know how to sell and market the product,
how to grow in scale a company, and how to find investors who
want deep technology. NSF is currently testing this follow-on
class, as you've heard, called I-Corps Go.
I hope everyone in this Committee is proud of the I-Corps
program that you've created and supported. It's one of the
programs that continues to make America great. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Blank follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. I now recognize Dr. Chang.
TESTIMONY OF DR. DEAN CHANG,
ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT,
INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP,
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND;
LEAD PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR,
DC I-CORPS REGIONAL NODE
Dr. Chang. Good morning, Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking
Members Johnson and Lipinski, and distinguished Members of the
House Science Subcommittee. I'm greatly appreciative of the
opportunity to testify and engage in a discussion with all of
you about the NSF I-Corps program.
My name is Dean Chang. Sometimes it helps if I clarify that
Dean is my name, not my title. I'm the Associate V.P. for
Innovation Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland. And
we've already heard from my fellow witnesses about the lab-to-
market impact that I-Corps has had. So as a Lead Principal
Investigator for the NSF I-Corps node for the D.C., Maryland,
and Virginia area--we like to call it the DMV node--I'd like to
use my five minutes to highlight two specific areas of impact
of I-Corps.
Area number one, the impact of I-Corps on the regional and
national level; and area number two, the impact of I-Corps on
undergraduate education. Area number one, NSF has created a
National Innovation Network with eight I-Corps nodes across the
country. What is a node, you might ask? Well, nodes are
basically charged with rallying and marshalling together the
many universities, investors, entrepreneurs, and industries in
our geographic regions and getting everyone to work together as
one. It's my observation that this has been one of the
hallmarks and most impactful contributions of the NSF I-Corps
program. In the past, critical startup knowledge of what worked
and what didn't often lived in the heads of a few expert
individuals. Most universities didn't have easy access to these
individuals, and that's really all changed now with I-Corps
nodes.
Here in the DMV node we have built up a strong bench with
over a dozen I-Corps instructors from University of Maryland,
Johns Hopkins, Virginia Tech, George Washington, Howard
University. Once or twice a year, NSF sends us about 25 teams
for the national I-Corps training, but the rest of the year our
dozen I-Corps instructors continue to teach in various versions
of the I-Corps program throughout the region to 200 teams each
year and these--those instructors even travel to other schools
to provide this I-Corps training to teams from George Mason,
from University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth, Morgan
State, and even outside the DMV to schools in Pennsylvania and
North Carolina.
This means that a team from just about any school in our
region can get access to any instructor from our node. For
instance, if you're a team from Morgan State, you now have
access to our instructor from Johns Hopkins, who specializes in
life sciences; our instructor from Maryland, who specializes in
virtual-reality, augmented reality, and UAVs; our instructor
from Virginia Tech, who specializes in DOD-funded companies; or
our instructor from George Washington, who specializes in
international markets.
And this picture I paint for our DMV node is the same at
the other nodes as well. In the Midwest, the University of
Michigan collaborates with Purdue and University of Illinois
and other schools in that region. In the Southeast, Georgia
Tech does the same with Universities of Alabama and Tennessee
and other schools in their region. And the same for the nodes
in the Northeast, the West Coast, the Southwest. So this
National Innovation Network of nodes created by NSF really has
an ``all for one and one for all'' sense of community across
the regions and across the country.
Area number two, the curriculum and methods in the national
I-Corps training are also widely being integrated--being widely
integrated into undergraduate education. At the University of
Maryland, key components of I-Corps training have been
incorporated into over 50 courses reaching over 7,000 students
each year. One of those classes is the senior capstone course
in bioengineering in which students spend the year working with
doctors to design medical devices. Before incorporating I-Corps
into the course, some beautiful devices were designed and
manufactured with little regard to validating a business model.
Now, the students spend time in customer discovery and learn
how improved health care also requires purchasing,
reimbursement, regulatory, and other issues be part of any
successful business model.
Two students in the course, Shawn Greenspan and Stefanie
Cohen said, quote, ``I-Corps finally put us on the road to real
customer discovery. Our initial business plan started with an
incorrectly identified buyer, value propositions that were
wrong, and guesses everywhere else. Fortunately, after 67
interviews, we now have a developing revenue model. We still
lots of work to do, but we now know where our answers lie:
outside the building.''
Shawn is now working at Palantir Technologies, and Stefanie
works for a spinal surgical implant company, and both Shawn and
Stephanie site I-Corps as a formative experience that gave them
the essential skills to be able to accelerate technology into
the market, skills that they are both using in their jobs
today. Many of the over 100 colleges teaching I-Corps have
similar stories of the impact I-Corps is having on
undergraduate education.
In conclusion, I-Corps has created a significant culture
change across campuses both among students as well as faculty.
Faculty who go through the national I-Corps training get
connected to the tremendous resources of the National
Innovation Network and come back eager to apply I-Corps
principles to their entire research portfolio, as well as to
their teaching. That in turn better prepares and better equips
students to make an impact on the economy and in society,
whether it be at a startup, at a large company, or even at a
nonprofit or in government.
Lastly, one of the things that made I-Corps so successful
has been the flexibility for I-Corps nodes to experiment and
innovate with the I-Corps program itself. In I-Corps we push
scientists to go beyond their comfort zone to find the
unexpected opportunities, so we need to continue to push
ourselves out of our comfort zone to keep making I-Corps
better. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Chang follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, Dr. Chang.
And now, we'll hear from Dr. Carter.
TESTIMONY OF DR. SUE CARTER,
PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS,
DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR INNOVATION
AND ENTREPRENEURIAL DEVELOPMENT,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ
Dr. Carter. Thank you. Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member
Lipinski and Johnson, and Members of the Subcommittee, it's an
honor to appear before you today. My name is Sue Carter, and I
am a three-time participant in the NSF I-Corps program and
currently run the NSF I-Corps site at the University of
California Santa Cruz.
In addition, I'm a physics professor who has transitioned
basics research out of the lab into startup companies three
times. Consequently, I can provide you my experience with NSF
I-Corps as a student and teacher of the curriculum and as a
faculty member and entrepreneur.
The strength of NSF I-Corps program is that it pushes
researchers to get out of the lab and into the community to
talk to potential customers, enabling them to better understand
the societal value or lack thereof that their research has. For
me as a faculty member, the insight has resulted in doing much
more impactful applied research. Similarly, as an entrepreneur,
the NSF I-Corps program has resulted in me spending
substantially less time and money to get a product to market.
Let me provide some--a few concrete examples. I have been a
principal at four startup companies: Add-vision, Solexant,
Soliculture, and the IRIS Science Academy. The first two
companies are before I had NSF I-Corps training, and the last
two are after I went through NSF I-Corps training. At Add-
vision, we raised over $6 million in funding both from
strategic partners and government grants. We used this funding
to develop a printable organic light emitting diode technology
to meet commercial specs given to us by our partner, but we
never fully identified a customer for the product, and thus, we
ended up selling the company to Sumitomo, a Japanese company.
If I had had the experience of the NSF I-Corps program, I
believe we could have identified customers much earlier on and
grown our vision into a U.S.-based company that could have been
a leader in organic light emitting diode technology, creating
hundreds of U.S. jobs.
At Solexant, we raised over $30 million in venture capital
funding. This money was focused on developing a thin-film solar
cell technology and building a manufacturing line in Oregon.
However, yet again, we failed to identify a customer and value
proposition for the product that was developed, which
ultimately led to the manufacturing facility never being built.
After burning through much of the initial multimillion dollar
investment, the company was taken over by new management who
understood that the value that we provided to our companies was
the low-cost manufacturing process that made the solar cells
rather than--I'm sorry, to our customers--rather than the solar
cells themselves.
If we had the experience of the NSF I-Corps program, I'm
confident we would have come to the correct product decision
two years earlier, enabling us to direct the initial $30
million to ensure U.S. solar industry's leadership in thin-film
technologies rather than losing much of this market share to
China.
The two companies I started after NSF I-Corps resulted in
us being able to sell commercial product to customers with much
less time and funding, namely less than $2 million in the case
of Soliculture and less than $10,000 in the case of the Science
Academy. The efficiency directly resulted from our many
conversations with the potential customers and key partners
that the NSF I-Corps program largely forced us to do. While
it's too early to know how many jobs Soliculture will generate,
its pathway to selling commercial product was many years faster
than my two previous companies.
Needless to say, I'm convinced that the small cost of the
NSF I-Corps training pays for itself many times over in
reducing startups time to market. For startups that receive
funding through the SBIR or STTR program, which I've also
received funding from, this also gives U.S. taxpayer money--
this also saves U.S. taxpayer money as it allows the principal
investigators to use the funding much more efficiently to
develop a technology that someone is willing to pay for.
Given my positive experience as a faculty member in the NSF
I-Corps program, I decided to offer the curriculum to students
at my university through a summer entrepreneurship academy.
While only a few of the students going through the program
actually start companies, the training has proven invaluable to
students as they seek employment after they graduate. Students
have come back to tell me that this is the most valuable course
they took at UCSC and received their job offer because they had
taken the I-Corps course.
Understanding how to listen to your customers and make
changes to a product so that it fulfills their needs is
important in almost any job but something that academia is very
bad at teaching students as we find ourselves sometimes stuck
in the echo chamber of a university.
I want to conclude with how the program can move forward to
better benefit students and entrepreneurs. So I'm running out
of time. I'm going to basically say that I'm a strong proponent
of I-Corps Go that is expanding our training so that students
can learn how to talk to VCs, how to form teams, and how to
understand the legal context behind their startups.
The other major issue is that the training is largely
limited to students, faculty, and their mentors, so I'd like to
see the program open up to our entrepreneurs, many of whom are
likely to be willing to pay to take the course. I know I would
have been. Some of our top young entrepreneurs received funding
through the SBIR/STTR program, so that might be an excellent
vehicle to expand the offering.
So, Madam Chairwoman, this completes my testimony, and I'm
looking forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Carter follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you very much.
Well, on that note then I think I would like to ask how are
some--you know, we have community colleges. We also often have
weekend programs that are adjunct like the Darden School does
in UVA, so George Mason. Lots of our universities have that
capacity to do that. How could we implement this program with
them, and are there any limitations right now to doing that?
Dr. Carter. Do you want me to address that? Well, I mean, I
can tell you right now that there's nothing that limits us from
working with community colleges. I have a lot of community
colleges in my area that--and I include those students in our
curriculum, so it just involves building a network and reaching
out to those colleges, so I don't think there's any limit at
all.
Chairwoman Comstock. Or and like--since we're talking
about----
Dr. Carter. Right.
Chairwoman Comstock. --people not even having to be in a
curriculum but just having the facility where they can go so
they can get the program.
Dr. Carter. Right. Yes.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. And, Dr. Chang, did you want
to----
Dr. Chang. Sure. And so I kind of alluded to this earlier,
that we've got this great bench of over a dozen instructors who
have worked at startups who have this experience that we're
talking about in teaching I-Corps, and when they're not
teaching in the official NSF I-Corps cohorts, we put them to
work to go to other schools in the region or even outside the
region. And what we've seen is that partly solves this problem,
so we can offer cohorts on the campus at UVA or wherever else
to help those--help the teams there.
But long-term what we really need to do is kind of like
what NSF does with the national program of train the trainer so
the somebody at UVA or somebody--actually they have pretty good
capacity already but some of these schools can develop their
own people that can continue to teach it more often they know
their own campuses better. They know what resonates with their
faculty and what's going to get them to come to increase
participation as well. So, you know, train the trainer has been
a centerpiece of the national program, and it's a point of
emphasis in the regional programs and needs to continue to be
more of a point of emphasis among regional programs.
Chairwoman Comstock. And by doing that train the trainer
program, you really could then have a self-sustaining program
wherever they've done that because I know at UVA, for example,
the Darden School makes money for the school is my
understanding----
Dr. Chang. Yes.
Chairwoman Comstock. --so if they're able then to attract
and people can, you know, go and do that there or other
universities----
Dr. Chang. Absolutely.
Chairwoman Comstock. --it's a money generator that would
support the whole education program.
Dr. Chang. Yes, absolutely. And you hit one of the key
challenges I'll say but it's the--but we're seeing some
successes in that the universities that can offer this kind of
training need to figure out a way how they can continue to
provide it not just as volunteer work.
So if it can be sustainable, if there's a business model,
whether it's like Darden's executive education model or even
partnering with economic development agencies, whether it's
Virginia Center, CIT, or Maryland TEDCO, the state economic
development agencies, if they fund some of these programs to--
for these instructors, now, you've got like the self-sustaining
ecosystem which helps the economic development agencies because
the money, the grants, the investments they make in their
companies are going to pay off--be more likely to pay off if
they've had this I-Corps-like training. So we're starting to
see some of that, but formalizing that is really critical.
Dr. Carter. I want--I was going to add one more thing here.
I mean at UC Santa Cruz we actually started the course before
we actually had the funding, so I had to come up with a way to
fund it. And the way we did it is it's actually part of our
required--it's a course that students can take to fulfill the
requirement for graduation, so it's--you know, they pay tuition
and fees. It's called ``Creative'' believe it or not. Its focus
on--it fills our creative general credit, and so students can
take it to help them graduate with their degree.
Chairwoman Comstock. All right. And then as part of sort of
the whole regional innovation ecosystem, what other places
could we plug this in? Because I'm thinking--we have throughout
my district we have sort of startup areas, but what I hear from
young people who want to leave here and go to California or
Colorado or someplace where they feel is a little bit more
startup-friendly, that there's more sort of just like say your
local chamber or your local county government has sort of
these, you know, centers where you can go and have that type of
innovation ecosystem. Is there a way--I mean, there's nothing
preventing us from plugging that into whatever type of startup
center or innovation center that you might have in your area,
right?
Dr. Chang. Absolutely not. In fact, you know, I think one
of the really--the real valuable things about doing the
customer discovery that we've all talked about going to talk to
customers is sometimes you might find that the only viable
customer might be in a different location, in which case the
prudent thing would be to go there, but oftentimes you might
find there are some customers right in your backyard that you
never knew about, and it wasn't until you got out of the
building and talked to them and understood their needs that you
realize that there's basically this goldmine in your backyard
that you never really investigated. Absolutely.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. Great. Well, thank you.
And I now yield to Mr. Lipinski for five minutes.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you, Chairwoman.
I wanted to in some way sort of follow up on that with a
question of how can this help--how can I-Corps be leveraged
for, you know, economic revitalization in areas that--you know,
we're talking about doing this in areas that, you know, are
already pretty--doing pretty well, especially if you have a big
university, but how about economically depressed regions of the
country? How could this have an impact? And I'll start with Mr.
Blank.
Mr. Blank. Well, Congressman, I think that's a great
question. If--but if you remember, not only are there eight
nodes, there are 86 sites across the country that now teach the
I-Corps class and methodology. And many of them are in
communities where they're past clusters, whether it was
manufacturing or other past 20th-century industries have
collapsed. And now for the first time this can be a seat around
this college and university of training entrepreneurs that
don't have to go to Boston or New York or Silicon Valley to
actually stay in their local communities and start building
companies. And as Dr. Chang mentioned, these universities and
colleges are figuring out how to partner with their own
regional economic development organizations to actually get the
capital to scale to the next level. And so what we've started
to see is I-Corps is kind of the rejuvenation of innovation and
entrepreneurship in places that historically have just been
bypassed in the last decade or so, and we're kind of proud of
this consequence of the program.
Dr. Tilbury. Can I----
Mr. Lipinski. Dr. Tilbury?
Dr. Tilbury. Yes. I would just add that the I-Corps teams
come from almost every State in the country, so even though the
nodes are--there's eight of them in 86 sites, as he mentioned,
there are teams coming from almost every corner of the country,
and they can take their learning that they had in the I-Corps
program back to their home district to start their company if
that's really the right place for it, as was mentioned.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. Dr. Carter, you want to add
something?
Dr. Carter. I wanted to say that the University of
California Santa Cruz it might sound like it's near Silicon
Valley, but we're actually sitting in the middle of Salinas
Valley. We have the highest youth crime rate within an hour of
us. We're also one of the highest poverty areas in California.
So we're a Hispanic-serving institution, so we're mainly
servicing those students that are underprivileged and have had
very difficult circumstances growing up. We have a lot of
first-generation students in our programs.
And I would like to say that in terms of diversity, STEM
diversity, I see more diversity in I-Corps than I do with our
science and engineering classes. I think that the first-
generation students, the students that don't have the
privileged backgrounds, realize how important it is for them to
learn entrepreneurial skills, be able to create their own jobs,
and so they are very much attracted to those courses, more so
than the standard STEM students who just think they're going to
go get a job in Silicon Valley and they're going to be done
with it, right? So I think that this is a way to actually get
underrepresented minorities involved in STEM careers.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. I want to ask about the--you know
I--well, I'll just say obviously, the--one of the strongest
arguments in favor of I-Corps is it's transformative. You know,
you have a small amount of government investment in education
yielding huge results in terms of the ability of participants
to learn entrepreneurship, attract follow-on funding, hopefully
achieve their--and some have--certainly achieved their
commercialization goals. So expanding the program, I want to
ask Mr. Blank. How do you think that the expanded curriculum
would be similarly transformative?
Mr. Blank. Thank you, Congressman. You know, one of the
things we've now learned over six years is that this program
does a spectacular job of teaching scientists things they
thought they could precomputed like who a customer should be
and how do I price it and where do we sell it. And as--for the
last--previous 30 years we've discovered, no, you can't
precompute that without getting out of the building. Now that
we got them to understand who customers are, we realize that
the next step is teaching them how to actually raise money and
build teams and actually turn this into a scalable company. And
that's after we've kind of raised the bar. We just realized we
need to raise the bar again. And the NSF has pioneered these
prototypes of I-Corps Go classes that I think are doing just
that to actually accelerate these teams to the next step in
commercialization. And I think this is spectacular for the
country.
I should also mention, by the way, this I-Corps curriculum
has become the gold standard not only in our federal research
agencies but now in the DOD and intelligence community as well.
It's now being adopted in almost every agency and across the
world as well, just an amazing program and kudos to the NSF.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. My time is up. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize Mr.
Webster.
Mr. Webster. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Blank, I heard another definition of hypothesis. That
is a wild guess carried out to two decimal places. But, Dr.
Tilbury, I had a question. I'm from Central Florida, the
University of Central Florida. They're one of the sites. And
are all of the sites universities?
Dr. Tilbury. Yes, I believe all the sites are universities,
but they serve the broader population of their region.
Mr. Webster. So are they usually housed in some--one or
more colleges of that university or are they housed in a
separate center or how does it usually work?
Dr. Tilbury. I think it depends on the university. It could
be housed in, say, the College of Engineering or the Vice
President for Research or even a center for entrepreneurship if
there is one at the university. I don't think there's a
standard.
Mr. Webster. So there's no real--there's just a framework
but not a big----
Dr. Tilbury. It's a framework, and each university who
applies to be a site talks about what niche they intend to fill
with their site and how that will work for them. Maybe Dr.
Carter could talk about--she has a site at UC Santa Cruz.
Mr. Webster. Okay. Let me ask you something. Dr. Carter, is
yours external to the university or a separate entity?
Dr. Carter. Ours is internal. Ours is actually under the
division of graduate studies, which means it can represent
every--all the disciplines equally. But we also work with
undergraduates, too, even though we're in the graduate studies.
Mr. Webster. Before you got the grant, did you have a
similar program or something that would be a cousin to that
ongoing?
Dr. Carter. Not exactly. We had some starting pieces of it,
but we do not have any business school or law school at
University of California Santa Cruz, so this is our--this is
basically the training our students get to launch their
businesses. So the funding really helped us. We wouldn't be
able to do what we do today without the funding.
Mr. Webster. So--but if there were some things were working
that would kind of be a cousin to that, did those remain or did
you just to begin focusing on----
Dr. Carter. They remained.
Mr. Webster. They did?
Dr. Carter. Yes.
Mr. Webster. So tell me a little bit about the governance
of it.
Dr. Carter. Sure. So in our case we have a--I'm the
director of the center. We have an executive leadership board,
which has all the deans from the campus that oversee what we're
doing, and also we have a faculty advisory board that contains
faculty and staff that advise our program. And then underneath
us we run about four different other entrepreneurial sites that
were kind of the framework, but their centers focus on social
and creative entrepreneurship, on STEM-based entrepreneurship,
on art-based entrepreneurship, and we help those three programs
also, providing them the instructors they need to run their
courses.
Mr. Webster. So is the team or teams--I guess you have more
than one team----
Dr. Carter. Yes.
Mr. Webster. --are they led by a faculty member?
Dr. Carter. No, they are--they're advised by a faculty
member and a mentor. So I have an open-door policy. Any team
that wants--I meet with all the teams regularly to give them
advice to how to move forward. I set them up with mentors that
they may need to get help. If there's another faculty member
that I think can help them, I will send them directly to the
other faculty member or sometimes it's a staff member. So we
make sure that we meet with them regularly and they get the
resources they need to get the--move their thing forward.
Mr. Webster. Dr. Tilbury, is there a cutoff point where,
okay, there are these teams, they're working on an idea, they
want to turn it into a business, they want to be entrepreneurs.
Is there a cutoff point or some way where you decide it'll
either happen or it won't happen or is that done by money, just
you can get any money, or what?
Dr. Tilbury. So the I-Corps training, the formal training
is about six weeks, and at the end of that six weeks, each team
should have a decision, yes, we're going to go ahead and
commercialize the technology or no, it's not ready yet, we need
to go back to the lab and improve it in order for it to be
ready or there's really no customer who is interested in this
so you----
Mr. Webster. So the team could start all over with a new
idea or a modified idea?
Dr. Tilbury. They could absolutely start all over. It
might--but rather than starting the company and investing a lot
of money to find out that we've developed this product that
there's no customer for, it's better to determine that within
this boot camp, the six-week time frame.
Mr. Webster. I'm familiar with the University of Central
Florida a little bit and their program there. It's a pretty
awesome thing, and they're trying to train entrepreneurs, a
great thing.
Dr. Tilbury. Great.
Mr. Webster. I support it. By the way, they're the only
undefeated Division I football team in the country. I yield
back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. And I now recognize Ms. Esty for
five minutes.
Ms. Esty. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock and Ranking Member
Lipinski. And I want to thank the four of you for joining us
today on this really important topic, which I see as critical
to U.S. competitiveness and to diversification of our STEM
workforce, and those two things are related. So I want to say
that I'm probably from Connecticut where accelerate UConn is in
fact one of these nodes and is already proving to be incredibly
successful. And in fact I was pulled out by our local contact
from the Department of Commerce to talk about some of these
issues and more things we need to do in our State to better
link the world of work and the world of commerce, as Dr.
Blank--Mr. Blank talked about, with what's happening in the
lab.
So I wanted to--Mr. Blank, you talked about something that
I think is really important for Americans to understand and
frankly for a lot of my colleagues to understand the critical
role that I-Corps is playing in that deep tech. I grew up sort
of in the Silicon Valley area, and I think there's still a
lingering assumption here that that's what's happening now in
Silicon Valley rather than the dramatic change that happened
with the chase for unicorns and a fast turnaround so that
without government support not only for basic research but
government support and help to guide the scientists who are
engaged in that deeper tech, so, for example, what intersects
with DARPA, what intersects with other parts of the military.
Could you expand on that a little bit?
Mr. Blank. Yes, Congresswoman. That's in fact a great
insight. You know, in the 20th century, venture capital, that
is, investors in Silicon Valley and national interests actually
were pretty well aligned. We invested in medical technology, we
invested in computers, we invested in things that actually made
the country better, safer, secure. In the 21st century
they're--I will contend they're unaligned. Venture capitalists
can make a ton more money than investing in short-term, you
know, bitcoin investments or smartphone apps or social media,
which are great for their investors, but one could argue that
the money would be better spent on other things like genetic
editing for healthcare or applications in other places.
And this un-alignment has really created kind of a gap
between what gets invested that requires patience and long-term
vision. And in fact the few agencies in the country that do
that, one of them is the National Science Foundation that
invests in what we call deep tech that requires long-term
investment and patience for basic materials science, basic
health care at the NIH, et cetera. And I think this Innovation
Corps program is part of that deep vision, deep patience in the
long-term investment that just private capital does not do
anymore.
Ms. Esty. Thank you. I really appreciate that.
Dr. Tilbury and Dr. Carter, you should know that actually
Chairwoman Comstock and I earlier this year had bills signed
into law Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act and really
wanted to focus a little bit on the particular role and
importance of something like I-Corps in diversifying our STEM
workforce and ensuring--because we've found that women in the
STEM fields and women generally are having more challenges
making that leap into the entrepreneurial space, fewer mentors,
less access to capital, and that I-Corps is actually playing a
really important role. And, Dr. Carter, you talked about the
difference that made in your own experience.
Dr. Tilbury, could you expand a little bit more
systematically of what we've learned because I think Dr.
Carter's testimony speaks to the reality of what it meant for
her in getting that training?
Dr. Tilbury. So absolutely. At the National Science
Foundation we're absolutely committed to broadening
participation in all aspects of science and engineering and in
particular in the I-Corps. So some of the pilot sites that
we've started are focused on broadening participation. Some of
them focused on including more women in startup companies; some
of them focused on including underrepresented minorities or
even people with disabilities. And they have unique vision into
what the needs are for women, for disabled people that can
really have an opportunity to create very successful companies.
So we feel this is a good investment. It's still a pilot, but
we're looking for good results to come out of these
investments.
Ms. Esty. Dr. Carter?
Dr. Carter. Yes. You know, I mean, I will say that, you
know, women are most--are generally attracted to solving
problems that affect their communities, so I think this is a
natural fit to bring women into the STEM fields and to get them
included in our entrepreneurial ecosystem, so I see it--I mean,
we're trying to hit 50 percent numbers in our programs for
women entrepreneurs, and I anticipate that we'll hit that.
Ms. Esty. Thank you. And the last thing I wanted to mention
again, Mr. Blank, you talked about the hands-on
entrepreneurship, and I think that is so critical. We've
learned, for students, hands-on learning is the best. Hands-on
science learning works better but that--taking that same
insight and translating it into entrepreneurship I think is
something we need to remember that I-Corps is championing, and
we want to support you in any way we can in these endeavors.
Thank you very much and I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize Mr.
Marshall for five minutes.
Mr. Marshall. Yes. Well, good morning. Kind of running back
and forth between a couple committee meetings, as is usual for
us, so thank you for your testimony, so proud of what the--what
you all are doing. One of our jobs in Congress is always to
figure out what's working well and to reemphasize this, and I
was able to take the Chairman of this Committee, Chairman
Smith, to Wichita State University and share with him some of
the things happening on their innovation campus as well, so
very proud to see how this is working.
I would just like to hear a few more positive stories and
give you all a chance just to share positive stories about how
this is happening, and maybe just start with Dr. Tilbury and go
down the line, you know a great real story that you would
share.
Dr. Tilbury. So I can tell you the story of one of my
colleagues, Professor Awtar from the University of Michigan,
mechanical engineering. So when he started as an assistant
professor, he got his NSF career award, which is for junior
faculty, and then he got another basic fundamental research
award from the Engineering Directorate. And he developed a new
way to kinematically re-map your hand movements into the edge--
end of an end-effector for remote surgery purely mechanically,
no electric controls required.
So he got an I-Corps grant and started a company and then
got an SBIR and built this company that's building these
medical devices, very low-cost, very safe, to be used in
multiple dimensions. And now, I'll be happy to say he's back on
campus and got another fundamental research award, and so we'll
see if he--now that this company is launched, we'll see if he
develops another new technology. We're very excited.
Mr. Marshall. Well, great. I keep telling everybody that
innovation can do more to drive the cost of health care down
than any piece of legislation we can write if the Federal
Government would just get out of the way.
Mr. Blank?
Mr. Blank. Yes, Congressman. I'm going to give you a story,
probably one that doesn't get told often, and that's about
failing fast.
Mr. Marshall. Yes.
Mr. Blank. One of the great things about the I-Corps
program is that it's hard to avoid bad news because it's in
front of your face. Our best example is when we taught the
class at UCSF, University of California at San Francisco, for
life sciences the chief of surgery of UCSF said, ``Well, I'll
set up a team, too, just so I can act as a role model for my
students.'' And he had an invention that he'd been working on
for three years in the lab, hernia repair. And Dr. Hobart
Harris said, ``Well, this will be pretty easy. I'll just get
out of the building and I'll talk to the other surgeons. I've
been working on this for two or three years with my co-
surgeons. Obviously, everybody will love this.'' The third week
of class he comes back and his face is pale. He said, ``No one
else wants it.'' And in fact at the end of the class he said,
``You know what, this isn't a viable commercial technology.''
And he still, four years after the class, is proselytizing the
fact that not only can this help you build a company, it could
also help you not waste years of your time and tens of millions
of dollars of both government capital and private capital.
Mr. Marshall. Thanks. Dr. Chang?
Dr. Chang. So I mentioned the bioengineering class earlier,
but I'll give another story that also ties into engineering
so--but starts with research. There's a professor named David
Tilley in our School of Agriculture, really innovative
research, and he went through an introductory--introduction to
I-Corps program that we offered locally, saw, wow, this is how
I can explore whether I can apply my technology in the
marketplace and with the national cohort in Texas. That was
about a year ago. They've launched the company. They've since
gotten follow-on funding from the Maryland State economic
development agencies, so all the things you'd like to see.
But the big sea change for him was also that he wanted to
apply throughout his entire research portfolio and get his
other colleagues in the School of Agriculture to also be
looking for applications and applying at I-Corps. So he's
actually teaching this in his classes. He teaches a class now
where he teaches I-Corps principles, and he's applying for an
NSF grant that is an interdisciplinary addressing--a grant
addressing multiple areas from technology, but a big emphasis
is training graduate students. A key part of his proposal is
training our graduate students in these I-Corps principles so
that they can learn these and take it forward as well.
Mr. Marshall. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Carter?
Dr. Carter. Yes, I want to give an example of an
undergraduate because we hadn't heard very many undergraduate
stories yet. And I've had students--my site just got funded
like this year so it's just started, but we did some pre-I-
Corps classes and I had students through that, so I'll show an
example. One of them is this guy Sukh Singh who basically had a
technology where he had--basically was taking kids'
handwriting, you know, when they were 4 or 5, six years old and
letting them convert that over to Java code, JavaScript.
And he went through the program and realized that the
really big need that was there was that teachers don't know how
to treat--teach computer programming, right? They have no
concept of how to do that, especially at the, you know, younger
ages. However, they had no problem teaching basic math, so what
he was able to do is pivot his company in order to create a
product that allowed students--teachers to teach their kids the
basics of JavaScript programming through math----
Mr. Marshall. Yes.
Dr. Carter. --by having them do math work and having them
create games and objects and artwork. And he was able to--with
no money invested whatsoever, he's expanded now to I think five
or six schools in Santa Cruz bringing in $20-30,000 of revenue
a month now to keep his company supported and is looking at
growing nationally, and said he did this all just----
Mr. Marshall. Yes.
Dr. Carter. --bootstrapped.
Mr. Marshall. Thanks for sharing your stories.
Dr. Carter. Yes.
Mr. Marshall. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. I now recognize Mr. Beyer
for five minutes.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you very much
for introducing us all to this concept and its remarkable
success.
Dr. Tilbury, Peter Drucker, the famous business writer,
said that ``Nothing happens until the sale is made.'' I was
impressed that this is--you point that this is about--more
about market failure than technical failure, but it was also
noted that you said that ``The entrepreneurial lead in that
three-person team was typically a postdoctoral scholar with a
deep commitment to investigating the commercial landscape.''
I'm trying to think if I've ever known a postdoctoral scholar
who knew anything about marketing, sales, service, or the like.
Why is that a particularly good person to be the
entrepreneurial lead?
Dr. Tilbury. So thank you for your question. It's usually a
postdoc or a graduate student who's deeply engaged in the
technology, so there the person in the team that is most deeply
understanding of the technology. The faculty advisor has the
broader perspective of the technology, and then there's an
entrepreneurial mentor, the third person of this three-person
team, and it's the entrepreneurial mentor that will help the
team understand what they need to do to make this technology a
commercial success. But you need someone on the team who is
willing to put in the 40, 60, 80-hour weeks to build the
technology and get it out of the lab, make it ready for
commercialization.
Mr. Beyer. And, Mr. Blank, thank you very much for
providing all the intellectual drive for this whole I-Corps
movement. You said, ``Part of the big thing is how to hire and
build teams that know how to sell and market products.'' That
sounds like all of America or all business in general. How do
you do that?
Mr. Blank. Well, I'm going to answer that, but I want to
answer your first question.
Mr. Beyer. They're almost the same question.
Mr. Blank. Yes, but it's really interesting because if you
think about it, you go, wait a minute, why do we have to train
those entrepreneurial leads to do this? They should just hire a
V.P. of sales, and they take the tech and go out and sell it.
And that's not their skillset; it's someone else's skillset.
And it turns out that's where we went wrong. We went wrong
because we assumed that just because they had an idea, you
could now slap a salesperson on it and sell it. It turns out
that almost always their initial idea of who to sell it to, how
to package it up is almost always wrong. And the only people to
figure out whether it's wrong or right is not a salesperson;
it's actually the technologist themselves. And we've now
learned that the initial people who go make the first sales and
try to understand that are best done by the technologists.
So it's easier to train a technologist to understand
customers than it is to train a salesperson to understand deep
tech. That's the big lightbulb. That's the whole idea here is,
wait a minute, let's train the scientist. You know, with all
due respect, business can be figured out quicker than you could
figure out biotech or some of these arcane sciences. That's the
key idea about I-Corps. And in fact, once you train them that
this is nothing more than testing guesses or hypotheses, that's
what they do in the lab all the time. I don't know if I
answered your question.
Mr. Beyer. You did. You remind me that in--I've been
selling for more than 40 years, and it was discouraging to
realize that I knew all the math I needed to know by third
grade to sell.
Dr. Tilbury, Dr. Carter talked about she'd seen great
diversity in the I-Corps teams themselves, but there is
historically huge underrepresentation of women and minorities
in startups. Silicon Valley is legendary. So do you use this as
a metric from the National Science Foundation how I-Corps is
able to expand diversity?
Dr. Tilbury. Thank you. As I mentioned earlier, NSF is
absolutely committed to broadening participation in all aspects
of science and engineering, including in I-Corps, and we have
funded some pilot sites that are specifically targeted to
increase the representation of women, underrepresented
minorities, and people with disabilities in the entrepreneurial
innovation ecosystem.
Mr. Beyer. Very cool. And, Dr. Chang, who is not a Dean or
is a Dean, you talked about pushing scientists to go beyond the
comfort zone, which is once again the challenge for all of us
in life. How hard has that been to get people who love to be in
labs and think deep thoughts to get out there and talk to real
people on the street?
Dr. Chang. It's extremely challenging. I mean, you know,
you can ask any university, the numbers will be about the same,
but it's a very small number of faculty who actually want to
start a company. You know, maybe it's five percent, maybe ten
perhaps but--to actually start the company. But almost all
faculty want to see what they're doing have an impact. And one
of the beauties of I-Corps--and Dr. Tilbury kind of talked
about it with your question related to entrepreneurial lead is
it doesn't have to be the faculty member that takes this
forward. The faculty member just has to be supportive of the
efforts to explore where it can go forward.
And so if you've got, as Congressman Lipinski mentioned,
only half of Ph.D. students entering academic fields, what are
the other half going to do? Well, if they can explore these
opportunities to find out where can the sale be made, they
aren't actually necessarily tasked with the ones at the end of
the day closing the sale, but if they can identify where the
sales can be made and shape the direction of the technology
development, I mean, some of our most successful I-Corps
stories, they're--they went through I-Corps three years ago
because what they learned fundamentally changed not their core
expertise but the direction that they were going to apply it.
And it took a long time to build the technology. And you can
imagine over three years being slightly off course where they'd
end up three years later.
So, you know, I think for faculty just kind of thinking
about it may not be you, but your research is going to have a
greater impact and you want to help your students find jobs,
and if half of them aren't going to be in academia, this is a
great way to help your students find jobs.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you very much.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I wanted to ask, do you
have a percentage of women who are participating in the
program?
Dr. Tilbury. I don't have that number at my fingertips, but
I could get that for you.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. Because I'd be interested in
that and overall diversity, as well as what is done to recruit
in particular to help those numbers, to get more in the
pipeline because I know I've had a young woman's leadership
program that I've just run informally in the summer, and we've
had to very aggressively recruit to make sure we are getting
young women from different communities that maybe their parents
aren't saying, hey, why don't you do this. You know, and we're
reaching kids in junior high and high school, so we're really
trying to get them into a leadership program that opens up to
some exposure for them to other women leaders and to ideas. But
we really have to go into particular communities to kind of
pull them out, and so I just would be interested in what
methods you might use to enhance that and make sure that they
are participating in a program like this.
Dr. Tilbury. So thank you. I think that's one of the
purposes of these pilot sites that we have that are focused
specifically on trying to increase the representation of women
or minorities or disabled people in the entrepreneurship.
Chairwoman Comstock. Right.
Dr. Tilbury. So that's their focus.
Chairwoman Comstock. Good.
Dr. Tilbury. And we'll look forward to seeing their
successes.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. And it would just be helpful if
we could get some of those numbers, too, because--and make
sure--and best practices that might apply for us in other
areas, so thank you.
And I now recognize Mr. Banks for five minutes.
Mr. Banks. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thanks to each of
you for being here. This has been an enlightening discussion
for me, learning more about I-Corps.
I wonder, though, to start with, Dr. Tilbury, as the
curriculum has been developed and the program has been
launched, how can the private sector invest more and take on
more responsibility for sustaining the program?
Dr. Tilbury. So thank you. I think there is an opportunity
for the private sector. Many people who participate in the
teams, the entrepreneurial mentors come from the private
sector. Most of the programs are offered through universities,
and some of them have partnerships with the private sector to
fund those programs. So I think there's many different
opportunities. I don't have a specific----
Mr. Banks. So there are mechanisms for the private sector
to invest their own funding? That can already occur?
Dr. Tilbury. I think through the universities would be the
way to go. Do you have another----
Dr. Chang. I was just going to add, so the SBIR program,
for instance, I-Corps has started to be used--actually not
started--it's been a couple years now it's been incorporated
into the SBIR phase 1 awardees from NSF, and that's been
transformational for the program but also, as I understand it,
there's a phase 2B, a component of that SBIR program where not
only do you get funding from NSF, but it's a side-by-side
investment with a private institution. So you're sort of
meeting halfway because the technology still needs to be
developed and you're kind of sharing that risk, and if it ends
up where you think it will, now the private company that was a
partner in that is going to go all in.
Dr. Carter. And I can tell you what we do. Our center--
except--the NSF I-Corps site--our center is completely
privately funded. We get donations from alumni and various
people in the community who really want to see our students be
successful and move forward. We also introduced something known
as the founders' pledge, which basically allows--it's no firm
commitment but basically says if the students go off and do
really well and make money that they will commit giving money
back to the program that we can use to then support future
students. So I see this being self-supporting.
Mr. Banks. Mr. Blank?
Mr. Blank. And if I can, I should maybe circled this back
to the intent of I-Corps Go. The current I-Corps NSF program
funds universities and university nodes. The intent of I-Corps
no is to take this--I-Corps Go is take this great curriculum
and open it up to the larger community. And that would allow
funding to go directly from private capital entities into these
startups, which not necessarily would be deep tech. Remember,
the NSF program is essentially for these orphaned technologies
that have a hard time crossing this ditch of death between
government basic science funding and private capital who wanted
to see something more advanced. I-Corps Go would actually
expand it to a much greater community with a proven curriculum
that actually works well.
Mr. Banks. Okay. So, do you think, in light of that, do you
think that startup companies would see value in spending their
own capital, their own money, to go through the training if it
were available to them?
Dr. Tilbury. I'd say absolutely. That's what Dr. Carter
said. She would have paid for it.
Dr. Carter. I would have paid for it, yes, no problem.
Mr. Banks. Okay. So we all agree with that? Okay. Thank
you. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize Ms.
Bonamici for five minutes.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock, and thank you
to the witnesses. I regret I was not able to hear you deliver
your testimony. There's an Education Committee happening at the
same time, and I'm trying to be at more than one place at once.
But I did read the testimony with interest.
I represent northwest Oregon, and we have certainly a lot
of tech startups and accelerators and a lot of incubators, and
this is a really interesting topic to me.
I wanted to start, Dr. Tilbury, you cited some data in your
testimony about companies that were formed and then funding for
teams that have been through the I-Corps curriculum. So what is
the full extent of the data that you have on outcomes? Are
there data that you're in the process of collecting so that we
could know what metrics we should be using for a full
understanding of the return on investment in I-Corps?
Dr. Tilbury. So thank you. There is absolutely a data
collection ongoing. I believe through the AICA Act we have a
biannual reporting to Congress, so sometime within a year--I
think January of 2019. Correct. So we are collecting data as
much as we can to understand.
Many of the startups that are coming out of NSF-funded
basic research are in this deep technology area that Mr. Blank
mentioned, and they might take five or even ten years to show
the results of their company. It's not just writing software.
You have to build something and maybe build a manufacturing
plant to make it. And so these timelines are much longer than
you might expect to see in something that's starting an app for
a smartphone.
Ms. Bonamici. Of course. Right. Thank you. So to the whole
panel, you know, our U.S. universities continue to lead the
world in basic research and in education. I just want to note,
as we're in the midst of discussion about the tax reform bills
that there are provisions that are of great concern to our
universities, particularly the--treating tuition waivers has
taxable income. Our universities are very, very concerned about
that, and I hope that when the conference committee meets, they
get the message that that's going to set us back as a leader in
innovation and research.
In some cases, universities can be slow to change and adapt
to emerging challenges and opportunities. I came from our state
legislature and, you know, I know that some of that happens. So
where do things stand now with respect to the sort of cultural
and institutional obstacles to expanding the entrepreneurial
culture at universities, and how has I-Corps helped, you know,
model some of the changes that--even in the last few years
where lessons could be learned at the university level and what
steps can federal agencies and institutions themselves take to
continue to expand entrepreneurship without compromising the
critical mission in research and education?
Mr. Blank. If----
Ms. Bonamici. I'll start with Mr. Blank.
Mr. Blank. If I can, I think that's a great question, and
the insight I'll offer with a smile is that in universities, I-
Corps is typically offered in the engineering school, not the
business school, which is a big idea. You know, one would have
thought that business schools would have led with this type of
entrepreneurial education, but in fact business schools
historically have been focused on large corporations and the
execution of a current business model, and that is how to make
current corporations better. And so for 100 years that's what
business schools did.
But this idea of innovation and entrepreneurship in the
engineering school was actually a new idea, and in fact is kind
of the breakthrough that's happened in the last six years with
I-Corps is that the engineering is actually now leading, the
thought leaders in the country for innovation entrepreneurship.
Dr. Chang. Also I'd like to add to that. So what's--my job
at the University of Maryland five years ago--I was appointed
by the President to aspirationally engage all 37,000 of our
students in innovation entrepreneurship, and that's an
impossible task. But----
Ms. Bonamici. But a good challenge.
Dr. Chang. But a good challenge. And I'll say that the
leans--or the I-Corps principles that we teach at startups,
those are exactly the same methods and principles I've used in
that mission. And that's the only way to succeed because at the
end of the day we teach our startups you have to figure out
where people spend their time and their money and you need to
go to where they are and offer a better solution in the way
that they're doing things because it's hard to change behavior.
That's even more so at colleges and universities.
And so the places where students are--let's focus on the
students for the moment--they're taking general education
courses. They're taking the prereqs for their major. They're
taking their required upper-level junior- and senior-level
courses, so embedding it--and initially, whether it's in
engineering or even in other majors as we've started to do,
embedding these kinds of methods and principles in those
courses are the way to spread it because going and asking for
more funding or more volunteers or more whatever is not going
to get you as far.
And the same thing is true on the faculty side, and faculty
are motivated by getting tenure, they publish in journals,
respected journals, and go to conferences, so we need to weave
in innovation entrepreneurship into things they have to do
along the path.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. And in my remaining few seconds I
just want to mention that this Congress and the last Congress
passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is the rewrite of
No Child Left Behind, so at the K-12 level there are attempts
being made to make sure that students get a more well-rounded
education, and hopefully, we are educating before they get to
college and universities, students to be more creative and
innovative.
And we've seen that in schools that, for example, are
adopting STEAM rather than STEM and integrating the arts and
making sure that people can think creatively and communicate
about what they're creating. So hopefully, when students get to
colleges and universities, they will be more able to have that
well-rounded approach and communicate what they are in fact
inventing. So there are efforts to start earlier to make sure
that we have a more creative and innovative workforce.
So thank you, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I thank our very
esteemed and knowledgeable witnesses for their testimony, for
your experience, for your wisdom and how we can really make
this innovative field grow, so it's very exciting and look
forward to continuing to work with you.
The record will remain open for two weeks for additional
written comments and written questions from Members, and this
hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:31 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
Appendix I
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Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
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