Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Academic researchers often recognize the commercial potential buried inside their labs, but translating that discovery into a viable business is rarely straightforward. Turning science into a startup takes time, customer insight, and guidance.

That is why the U.S. National Science Foundation created the Innovation Corps (I‑Corps) to help scientists, technologists, and inventors move their ideas into the marketplace.

The nuts and bolts of the I-Corps program

Registration is open for the spring cohort of the Regional Mid‑South I‑Corps program, which serves innovators across the University of Tennessee System. The five‑week virtual course will run from March 25 through April 22 and will conclude with a virtual pitch symposium.

Participants will take part in weekly educational sessions focused on technology commercialization, customer discovery, and developing a business model canvas. Each team is also required to conduct and log at least 20 customer discovery interviews during the program.

The deadline to apply is March 11 at 5 p.m. ET.

Some recent program participants who have officially taken the entrepreneurial leap include: Alec Readel, the founder of Applied 2D, who is now participating in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Innovation Crossroads program; Dr. Dustin Crouch, who founded EndoLimb last year to engineer prosthetic thumbs for amputees; Megan Cales, the Founder of Sensory Bridges’ Brooks Band, recently featured in Teknovation; and Martin Krivan and Fuhar Dhixit, the founders of Aquafer Technologies, which completed 103 customer discovery interviews during the course of the I-Corps fall 2025 program.

Apply here.

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