NCIIA-funded Technology Innovation with People with Disabilities Program Results and Best Practices
We developed a summer internship program that paired undergraduate business students with NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduate engineering students to evaluate the commercial potential of devices we are developing in our laboratories. We have run three cohorts (run in the summer programs) of ten projects, with twenty students, mentored by ten graduate students/post-doctoral fellows. We have assessed the impact of the internship with the students and mentors, and also have tracked commercialization success, which have included design awards and startup companies that have received SBIR funding. In this talk we will discuss our successes and challenges and propose what we believe is the best format for future years.