DESIGN INNOVATION PROCESS RESPONDS TO UNMET NEEDS CREATED BY COVID-19

This article presents a recent case study of the development and bringing to market of a new product through the design process of the author, Dan Brown, Ph.D. (Brown Sr.), a product design practitioner and academic with over 40 years of innovation experience, and his son Brown Jr., a business entrepreneur. This case explores how they collaborated as an entrepreneurial team to design and commercialize a novel PPE face shield using Brown Sr.’s Differentiation by Design research process. The article focuses on how design creates value and competitive advantage in markets by examining a recent case study of successful new product development arising from the COVID-19 pandemic -- providing adequate personal protective equipment (PPE).When seeking advantage in the practice of innovation, there is a creative quest that product design and development practitioners must address through their design process. Truly innovative and competitive new products are rare, as their design efforts often fall short of the original design aims. Brown Sr.’s past research has revealed that this creative quest often appears at the intersection of the existing knowledge boundaries of the user as well as the many less prominent stakeholders in the new product experience.Often framed as unmet stakeholder needs, this knowledge boundary appears when existing practice knowledge proves inadequate, but the development objective remains. These knowledge gap opportunities appear through detailed research of the problem, existing solution benchmarks, and stakeholders. They can also appear when the designer-researcher looks for them specifically. Finding these knowledge gaps and creatively conceiving advantaged solutions into competitively advantaged spaces or white spaces is the goal of this design process.This Case shares successful marketplace outcomes with Brown Sr.’s past research cases resulting from their design and development approaches. With a combined quantitative and qualitative research focus, this autobiographical case study builds on the insights available to the researcher. Autobiographic cases provide unique access to rich quantitative evidence of the design narrative and marketing histories gained from an insider’s view of industry practice.Competitive advantage and its role in innovation in the real-world laboratory of the marketplace provide the context for researching the process of this design-focused strategy. The process starts with reframing the fundamental problem, which was, in this case, how to rapidly produce millions of face shields in a matter of months; the Browns teamed up to create a viable and scalable shield solution for the masses.

Fueling Spin-offs: Case Studies of University-based Technology Start-up Funding

The new technologies born from academic research can be very promising, yet they are often very early stage. University spin-off companies are uniquely positioned to tackle the risks associated with new technologies emerging from academia by developing proofs of concept, functioning prototypes, and new products. While these enterprises start from a solid research and development foundation, they face their own unique set of challenges—they are strongly anchored in the scientific and technological expertise that is typically backed by intellectual property but often lack the business experience needed to develop and market products demanded by customers. University spin-offs have access to substantial non-dilutive funding that can be utilized for advancing product development. While the relentless pursuit of these funds builds a company's credibility and improves its position for negotiating future private investment, university spin-offs would greatly benefit from an early focus on complementing their technology teams with their business teams. These new enterprises should consider pursuing private investment in parallel to utilizing sources of non-dilutive funding. Timing of private investment is extremely important to maximize the value of the opportunity, and, therefore, building relationships with investors early on and getting ready for executing an investment round can greatly increase odds for success. While there is no single path to formulate, pursue, and adapt successful financing strategies, lessons can be learned from real-life cases of university spin-offs that continue their journeys towards ultimate success.

Functional Coatings for Damage Detection in Aerospace Structures

The future of aerospace structures is highly dependent on the advancement of reliable and high-performance materials, such as composite materials and metals. Innovation in high resolution non-invasive evaluation of these materials is needed for their qualification and monitoring for structural integrity. Aluminum oxide (or α-alumina) nanoparticles present photoluminescent properties that allow stress and damage sensing via photoluminescence piezospectroscopy. This work describes how these nanoparticles are added into a polymer matrix to create functional coatings that monitor the damage of the underlying composite or metallic substrates. Different volume fractions of α-alumina nanoparticles in the piezospectroscopic coatings were studied for determining the sensitivity of the coatings and successful damage detection was demonstrated for an open-hole tension composite substrate as well as 2024 aluminum tensile substrates with a subsurface notch.

Technology Transfer Assistance Project Brings VA Health Care Ideas to Life

Clinicians and staff of the Department of Veterans Affairs Health Care System (VA), who provide services to veterans, have invented many devices and methods for improving veterans' lives. However, translating those inventions to the market has been a challenge due to limited collaboration between the clinical inventors and the scientists, researchers, and engineers who can produce the prototypes necessary for licensing the technology. The VA Technology Transfer Program office and the Human Engineering Research Laboratories, a research laboratory with experience with developing prototypes and licensing technology, jointly developed a program called the Technology Transfer Assistance Project (TTAP) to bridge the gap between clinical inventors and prototypes ready for licensing. This paper describes TTAP and provides examples of the first inventions that were developed or enhanced through TTAP.

MGRP: Enabling Boundary-Breaking Innovation Through Academia and High Tech Industry Collaboration

In 1996, the Florida High Tech Corridor Council was established as an economic development initiative of the University of Central Florida, the University of South Florida, and the University of Florida with a mission to attract, retain, and grow high tech industry and innovation—and the workforce to support it—in a 23-county region. Recognizing the importance of high tech innovation to the overall region's economic health and growth, it established its cornerstone Matching Grants Research Program (MGRP), connecting local high tech companies with university researchers to further technological innovation and introduce new technologies into the marketplace. Since its inception, the MGRP has contributed to more than 120 patents and generated more than $1 billion in downstream economic impacts. The MGRP model for economic development has been internationally recognized by organizations such as the State Science & Technology Institute for its support of technology commercialization and regional workforce development. This paper demonstrates the far-reaching impacts of partnering with MGRP through three success stories of National Academy of Inventors Fellows who have become leaders within their respective industries thanks to the boundary-breaking collaborations introduced by MGRP.

Lessons Learned: Research Benefits and Beyond Associated with Participating in the NSF I-Corps™ Customer Discovery Program

The purpose of this study is to communicate lessons learned and benefits (which go beyond assessing commercial viability) from faculty principal investigator participation in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps™) Customer Discovery National Teams Program. The NSF I-Corps Customer Discovery National Teams Program markets itself as a program that "prepares scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the university laboratory and accelerates the economic and societal benefits of NSF-funded, basic-research projects that are ready to move toward commercialization." However, there is so much more to be gained by program participants. Unfortunately, researchers wouldn't know this unless they personally participated in the program or received insights from someone who has completed the program. This study aims to respond to the following research question: How does participation in the NSF I-Corps Customer Discovery Program benefit faculty principal investigators? This study integrates both secondary data, using VentureWell's data file and code book, which was developed as an assessment tool for the NSF I-Corps National Teams Program, and autoethnography, whereby the authors use a qualitative research approach to self-reflect upon their own experiences conducting customer discovery on energy-focused technologies. Findings show there is much to be gained by program participants, including improvements in overall career success attributes, such as learning, mentoring, and research capabilities. In addition, the results show faculty researchers how they can recreate the process on their own.

Is SBIR a Government Venture Fund?

The federal government's well-known Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program funds small businesses that are developing and commercializing innovative new technology. It is commonly regarded as a "government venture fund." This label is unfortunate. Within the U.S., it has caused the SBIR program to be criticized both for competing with private ven- ture capital funds (VCs) and for wasting scarce taxpayer resources on small businesses that, according to some detractors, are not as successful at generating innovation as venture capital (VC)-backed companies. These criticisms divert attention from SBIR program successes, generate unnecessary drama during congressional SBIR reauthorization debates, and sideline important opportunities to improve the SBIR program. Outside the U.S., the "government venture fund" concept disguises the very real differences between the SBIR program and VCs, potentially undermining the effectiveness of government initiatives to promote innovation. There are actually few similarities between the SBIR program and VCs—aside from the fact that both provide comparable amounts of seed-stage funding to small technology firms. As a matter of public policy, it needs to be clearly understood that the SBIR program is not a government venture fund, does not compete with VCs, and has objectives of national economic and soci- etal importance that do not conflict with those of private-sector investors. This paper begins by comparing the number and size of SBIR and VC seed-stage investments in the U.S. Then it contrasts their very different objectives, company selection criteria, staging of investments, obligations imposed on recipient companies, and metrics used to measure success.

Inventor Views on University Innovation: a Survey of National Academy of Inventors Fellows

Innovation in universities serves many purposes: helping society through technology transfer, building economies, supporting the aspirations of faculty and students to be entrepreneurs or make an impact, and generating revenue. Such outside-focused innovation is complemented by inside innovation, which aims to improve the practices of the university; to better serve society through education, research, and clinical care; and to remain competitive in the face of changes in technology and society. In this paper, we investigate how university innovators— represented by the Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors—are supported in outside innovation and how Fellows view university culture's support for inside innovation to improve university practices. Our survey received responses from 339 Fellows. Inventors indicated that they were helped in various ways and not just through traditional patenting and licensing. Help in creating a start-up, promotion of inventions in the media, and the consideration of inventions in promotion and appraisal contributed the most to their satisfaction, whereas royalty distributions had no significant effect on satisfaction. Overall, respondents were only mildly satisfied with institutional support for innovation as well as the pace of innovation at their institutions. While respondents generally agreed that their institutions were receptive to implementing faculty ideas, they were less likely to agree that their institutions were willing to take risks or try approaches not used by peers. Most respondents did not indicate that faculty satisfaction was a top-three institutional priority for innovation. They also were unlikely to indicate that disruption in education, research, or clinical care was a top institutional priority