Course and Program Grant Guidelines Deadlines: Friday, December 5, 2008 and Friday, May 8, 2009

Scope of NCIIA Course and Program grants 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. The Principal Investigator will be notified of the proposal status within approximately 90 days of the submission deadline.

Who may apply?
Faculty from NCIIA member institutions. To check if your institution is a member or to join/renew your membership, please click here.

What will be funded?
Our definition of a successful grant proposal includes 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.

Find out what we fund and confirm that your project is a match.

NCIIA grant proposals are reviewed by panels of busy professionals who volunteer their time. Please respect their efforts by ensuring that your project aligns with the mission and the requirements of the NCIIA. The links below provide the background information you will need.

About the NCIIA
About The Lemelson Foundation
Searchable database of all NCIIA Course and Program grants

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.

How to apply
All proposals must be submitted to the NCIIA online. Create an account and login here. You may start, save, stop and return to the proposal before submitting.
The submission deadline is 5 pm EST Friday, December 5, 2008. Start early!
The online application process has five steps and will require the following:

STEP ONE: Submit basic contact information

• Name of the institution you represent
• Names and contact information of team members (résumés up to 3 pages each will be required as attachments), including principal investigator (PI) and administrative contact (AC). The NCIIA defines the administrative contact as a grants administrator or fiscal officer authorized to commit the institution to the terms of the grant. Often, the AC works in the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs or the Office of Contracts and Grants. The PI and the AC cannot be the same person.
  

STEP TWO: Submit basic proposal information

• Project Title
• An abstract (250 words or less) with the top three objectives (in bullet format) of the program
  

STEP THREE: Request verification

• The following people must verify their support for your proposal: Administrative Contact (grants administrator or fiscal officer authorized to commit the institution to the terms of the grant), Dean of Faculty, Department Chair, and the Principal Investigator (this is waived if the PI is also the applicant). To ensure timely approval of your proposal by your institution, apprise them of your intention to submit 3-4 weeks advance of the deadline and share your proposal with them prior to submission.
• When you have entered their e-mail addresses, each of the above administrators will receive an automated e-mail address requesting their verification of support. Allow 2-3 days for them to respond.
• The proposal cannot be submitted until your administrators have responded to the request for verification.

STEP FOUR: Upload required documents

• An attached narrative (see description below)

Proposal narrative

Your proposal narrative may not exceed five pages in length. Prepare the narrative in Microsoft Word, using 12-point Times font.

Suggested narrative format with page length guidelines: maximum length may not exceed five pages

• Introduction: What problem(s) or needs are you addressing?
• History and context: What have you done so far? What support have you received for your work? What existing programs will you build on ?
• Work plan and outcomes: What do you hope to achieve? What changes will the program bring about? What steps are involved? What processes will you follow? How will you support commercial activity resulting from the grant? How will the program continue beyond the end of the grant period? How do you know the program will succeed?

Evaluation and sustainability plan: Please address how you will know if you have succeeded, and describe your internal measures of success. Reporting is an essential element in the NCIIA grant award process. Principal Investigators for NCIIA grants are responsible for reporting on grant activities within a specified time frame. A formal written report is required of every grant recipient; failure to report may jeopardize your institution’s eligibility for future grants. If you receive a grant, the reporting date will be shown in your award letter. Advance planning of your report helps you establish an assessment plan not only for benefit of the NCIIA, but for your own information and reporting to your institution. If you determine ahead of time specifically what you wish to evaluate, you will be able to gather appropriate data while your project is still in progress, rather than relying on anecdotal evaluation at a later date.

Appendix requirements (maximum of ten appendices, up to 5MBs each)

1. Budget template with budget justification (NCIIA requires you to use the budget template which you can download here).

   
   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.

   Eligible expenses

   • Equipment
   • Supplies
   • Travel
   • Technical services
   • Expenses related to students’ performing patent searches or creating marketing analyses, business plans, or prototypes
   • Faculty planning stipend (up to $5,000 total per grant--may be divided up among more than one faculty member)

   
   Ineligible expenses include, but are not limited to:

   • Overhead
   • Faculty salaries
   • Speaker honoraria over $200
   • Faculty stipends over $5,000 per grant (A $5,000 stipend may be divided up among several faculty members)
   • Wages for students during the academic year
   • Publicity expenses
   • Legal and other expenses of business formation or operation

2. Résumés (no more than three pages each) of participating team members

3. Letters of support
4. IP policy

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.

View our database of intellectual property policies>>

5. Other optional supporting documents, such as curricula, photographs, websites

STEP FIVE: Submit

• When you are sure Steps 1-4 have been completed and advisors have verified their support, please click submit. You will receive an email confirming the submission of the proposal. Submission deadline: 5 pm EST Friday, December 5, 2008.

Address questions to the NCIIA at (413) 587-2172, or email us.