NCIIA: Course and Program grants

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

The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance fosters invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship in higher education as a way of creating innovative, commercially viable, and socially beneficial businesses and employment opportunities in the United States. The program was founded on the premise that invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship are essential components of the higher education curriculum and vital to the nation’s economic future. The NCIIA works with colleges and universities to build collaborative experiential learning programs that help nurture a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs with strong technical and business skills and the tools and intention to make the world a better place.

Course and Program grants are awarded to institutions for the purpose of strengthening existing curricular programs or building new programs in invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Successful Course and Program grant proposals present creative pedagogical approaches that generate and deploy E-Teams, bringing real-life applications into the classroom setting and beyond.

Course and Program grants range in size from $2,000 to $50,000; the grant period is one to three years. Annual application deadlines are in December and May.

Proposal evaluation criteria

We favor proposals for courses and programs which:

-Introduce curricula that incorporate affordable design, social entrepreneurship, and other approaches that meet basic human needs and environmental issues.

-Stimulate the formation of E-Teams and promote the E-Team learning experience

-Encourage E-Teams to generate new technologies and businesses to meet basic human needs and address environmental issues, creating economically self-sustaining business and non-profit models.

-Generate balanced teams or curricula that are multidisciplinary, involving students and advisors from technical, business, and humanities disciplines, as well as groups traditionally underrepresented in invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including women and minorities

-Create opportunities for high quality group learning experiences.

-Move beyond academic exercises to real-life business interaction, and create viable collaborative opportunities for participants from both academe and industry.

-Demonstrate an institutional commitment to and plan for supporting the proposed course or program on an ongoing basis beyond the grant period.

-Show access to necessary resources from the institution (e.g., computers, work space, lab equipment).

-Demonstrate the commitment of the institution and faculty members to support the efforts of E-Teams that wish to continue their work after the course ends.

-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 with a design course, 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

Grant funds may be used for supplies, equipment, or expenses related to curricular development and course or program realization. Grant funds do not cover institutional overhead or faculty salaries, but can provide faculty stipends of up to $5,000. We award grants to institutions under the supervision of the principal investigator, who allocates funds as needed. Equipment and other resources purchased with grant funds become the property of the institution.

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_cp.html