USAID/The Lemelson foundation partnership award NCIIA to help translate innovations to impact

Ottawa, ON— Today at the Grand Challenges meeting in Ottawa, Canada, Wendy Taylor, Director, Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Carol Dahl, Executive Director of The Lemelson Foundation, announced a partnership between USAID and The Lemelson Foundation to award more than $700,000 to the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA).  The Foundation and USAID will each contribute $352,000 toward this effort. The funds will be used to enable USAID’s Saving Lives at Birth grantees the ability to avoid common pitfalls in scaling, helping them accelerate their ideas and inventions into sustainable solutions that will impact on the world’s poorest populations.

The customized training program, called Xcelerator, will leverage NCIIA’s experience in ensuring well-designed pathways to scale for socially-minded products and services. A pilot will initially be offered to grantees of USAID’s Saving Lives at Birth program, which funds the brightest minds across the globe to identify and scale-up transformative prevention and treatment approaches for pregnant women and newborns around the time of birth.

“Through Saving Lives at Birth and other programs, our Agency supports a large number of researchers and entrepreneurs who have innovative ideas and technologies with potential to save and transform lives,” says Dr. Rajiv Shah, Administrator for USAID. “The Xcelerator program is an important new effort to speed the development and distribution of these solutions for greater impact.”

“We are excited to capitalize on the capacity that The Lemelson Foundation has been building through its support of programs like the NCIIA, to recognize and nurture the path of ideas and inventions through the innovation process, and ensure products and services that have impact on people’s lives, says Carol Dahl, Executive Director of The Lemelson Foundation. “Leveraging NCIIA’s substantial experience, we’re collectively able to train inventors on how to turn their ideas into self-sustaining enterprises.”

“The Xcelerator training program is based on our successful VentureLab, an intensive and immersive program designed to enhance the success of startup enterprises. Participants come away with the skills, tools and support they need to increase the impact of their technological innovation or service,” says Phil Weilerstein, Executive Director of NCIIA. “The Xcelerator training will help participants develop a strategy map, various paths to scale, and give them tangible next steps for increasing the reach and impact of their innovations.”