NCIIA: Advanced E-Team grants

Sponsor: The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA)

Advanced E-Team grants provide E-Teams with the support they need to bring an innovative product or technology from idea to prototype, and eventually to market. Successful E-Team grant proposals demonstrate an idea’s technical feasibility, social value, and potential for commercialization. Advanced E-Team grants range in size from $1,000 to $20,000; the grant period is twelve to eighteen months. Annual application deadlines are in December and May.

Proposal evaluation criteria

We favor Advanced E-Team grant proposals that:

-Show a strong likelihood of developing innovations with realistic, well-documented technological and commercial promise

-Lead to the development of a product or technology designed for affordability, that directly benefits human health or the environment, or that follows a sustainable, socially motivated business model

-Demonstrate knowledge of the market and evidence of consumer interest

-Involve a balanced, multidisciplinary E-Team, including students, faculty, and advisors from technical, business, and humanities disciplines

-Reflect the diversity of the home institution, and actively engage faculty and students from groups traditionally underrepresented in invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including women and minorities

-Create opportunities for high-quality group learning experiences

-Create viable collaborative opportunities for participants from both academe and industry

-Incorporate a plan and a budget that are reasonable, achievable, and sustainable

-Demonstrate strong team commitment and faculty and institutional support

-Projects that make a difference

The NCIIA places a high value on grant proposals that demonstrate concern for the earth and the health and welfare of humans. We encourage our members to find creative approaches to addressing such issues as poverty, disease, and environmental degradation through affordable design, technologies that solve critical problems and meet basic human needs (such as food, water, shelter, health, safety, and education), and pedagogical approaches that encourage awareness of and interest in these global issues. Course and program grant proposals may focus on introducing these issues to students through a design course, by adding socially-focused E-Teams to an existing entrepreneurship course, or developing an entirely original program to engage students in problem-solving endeavors.

Use of grant funds

Advanced E-Team grants support later-stage development of an idea and planning for its commercialization. E-Teams may form as part of a course or on the independent initiative of students, faculty, or other representatives of member institutions. Grant funds are used for supplies, equipment, and/or expenses related to advanced stages of project development, including certain legal fees and student stipends. The grantee institution owns any equipment purchased with an advanced E-Team grant. NCIIA funding does not cover institutional overhead.

The E-Team faculty advisor is responsible for tracking, directing, and reporting the disbursement of grant funds, and is the principal investigator of record. An E-Team should consist of at least two graduate or undergraduate students and a faculty advisor. In addition, the team should include industry and business development advisors and mentors. If members of an E-Team come from different schools, at least one of these schools must be a member of the NCIIA and must administer the grant.

IP requirements

The NCIIA fosters student invention and entrepreneurship with the expectation that some student innovators will commercialize their services or products. We require sponsoring institutions to sign an agreement with The Lemelson Foundation when a grant is awarded. The agreement states in part that ownership of discoveries or inventions resulting from activities financed by NCIIA grants will be governed by grantee institutions’ intellectual property policies. If a school does not have an intellectual property policy, then the institution must develop an E-Team agreement that establishes ownership of ideas resulting from E-Team work. The NCIIA and The Lemelson Foundation take no financial or ownership interest in the projects funded by these grants. We supply copies of the grant agreement on request.

Deadline: May 11, 2007

For further information, please visit: http://www.nciia.org/grants_eteam.html