The National Science Foundation announced Sept. 13 that it has awarded $15 million over five years to establish and implement the Interior Northeast Region I-Corps Hub, known as IN I-Corps. The region, which stretches from New Hampshire to West Virginia, includes portions of the United States that are largely rural, economically underserved and working to restore economic vitality. IN I-Corps aims to expand the nation’s geography of innovation by creating a cohesive innovation ecosystem that delivers inclusive models of education and workforce training designed for and by innovators in rural regions and small cities.

“To be a part of this cohort of premier research institutions, whose dedication to innovation is so outstanding, is truly exciting,” says Per Stromhaug, associate vice president for innovation and economic development at Binghamton University. “The ecosystem that the Interior Northeast I-Corps Hub will support and expand is sure to create lasting effects for the entrepreneurs we will assist, as well as our region.”

Founded by the National Science Foundation in 2011, I-Corps programming nationwide empowers researchers to combine their technical and scientific knowledge with an entrepreneurial mindset to develop new technologies and startups that benefit society. The I-Corps curriculum addresses the knowledge gap between the skills needed to develop an innovative technology in a lab and the skills needed to bring that technology to market. With a core tenet of customer discovery, participants in I-Corps courses work to connect with potential customers and ensure the solutions they’re developing fill an existing market need.

Binghamton University will be joined by hub partner institutions Dartmouth College, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUNY Buffalo, Syracuse University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Rochester, University of Vermont, West Virginia University and Hub lead Cornell University. Each institution will be hosting regional I-Corps courses and contributing to programming and curriculum strategy.

The IN I-Corps Hub joins nine other I-Corps Hubs within the National Innovation Network, expanding the geographical reach of the network and promoting economic growth and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) talent development within rural communities and the small cities on their boundaries. The hub will offer regional courses designed to support geographically dispersed participants in learning the I-Corps method of customer discovery and applying it to real-world opportunities while remaining connected to their home institutions and communities.

Binghamton University has been an active member of the National Innovation Network (NIN), with its Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships heading up the Innovation Binghamton I-Corps Site for over five years.

“I-Corps has been tremendously valuable to our research community,” says Olga Petrova, assistant director of Binghamton University’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships, site director and I-Corps instructor. “It is incredibly rewarding to watch our professors and students take their real-world learnings from the I-Corps training back to their labs and research programs, leading to increased grant funding, startup activity and development of technologies with amazing societal benefits.”

A mission-critical element of the IN I-Corps Hub’s approach to entrepreneurship is the creation and administration of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives. STEM researchers in underrepresented groups face heightened barriers to success, and creating equitable access to resources and talent development is crucial to ensuring the most innovative deep-tech developments are being discovered and amplified. Hub leadership and partners are working to create opportunities to support the development of STEM research talent who are women, veterans, people of color and individuals with disabilities. These initiatives will include collaborations with organizations like the National GEM Consortium’s Inclusion in Innovation Initiative (i4) and Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

The IN I-Corps Hub will officially launch Jan. 1, 2023. Details are forthcoming for STEM researchers interested in learning about opportunities to participate in regional I-Corps courses at a Hub institution.

Her research involves understanding how people with psychopathic personality traits obtain “successful outcomes” — such as achieving occupational success (i.e., promotions, awards) or getting away with “bad behavior” (i.e., being unethical or having criminal behaviors).

The I-Corps program provides a month-long intensive course where participants discover the commercial potential behind their research or innovation and what their ideal customer base might be. It is designed for faculty, students, postdocs, researchers and startups with a research project that has real-world applications, a prototype or an early-stage product or technology.

The regional program provides a $3,000 grant to conduct customer interviews and further any prototypes; the national program provides a $50,000 grant.

Welsh’s work is conducted under the guidance of Mark F. Lenzenweger, distinguished professor of psychology, in his laboratory of experimental psychopathology. Together they co-authored “Psychopathy, charisma, and success: A moderation modeling approach to successful psychopathy,” which was recently published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

“Some psychopathic individuals who have been quite successful have been described as charming or charismatic,” Welsh says. “We wanted to know if charisma serves as a protective or moderating factor that allows psychopathic individuals to be more successful. Our most recent project suggests that psychopathic individuals who are highly charismatic are able to get away with ‘bad behavior’ and avoid punishment more often than psychopathic individuals who are less charismatic.”

Before joining the I-Corps program, Welsh thought her research, if used in a screening tool, might attract the interest of law enforcement, human resources and other hiring departments. After holding 20 customer discovery interviews with people from various industries, she found that her first adopters would likely be talent acquisition and recruiting agencies or staff who screen candidates for senior- and executive-level positions for moderate-sized to large organizations.

Anyone involved in personality science, organizational behavioral/industrial psychology or personnel selection and business administration scholars will find Welsh’s research to be instructive and rich with insights, Lenzenweger says.

“I see Emma making notable contributions to our understanding of psychopathy that will influence how many of the leading workers in the area will conceive of this disorder,” he says. “She is an engaged and creative emerging psychological scientist who brings her own ideas to research challenges, and this emphasis on originality makes her a clear standout.”

Welsh, who did her undergraduate work at New York University, says she appreciates how Lenzenweger encourages his graduate students to generate original and creative ideas. “Working with Mark has been absolutely wonderful because he encourages you to pursue your passion,” she says. “He wants his students to build their own program of research.”

Welsh, who grew up in Alpharetta, Ga., is staying open-minded about where her career path may take her.

“My findings through the I-Corps program have shown me that my research has a lot of potential industry applications, so the job I might want may not exist yet. I may need to create it. There is a gap and I can fill it,” she says. “I love both my clinical work and my research, so I hope to be able to continue to do both and merge my interests.”

Vukasinovic, a Binghamton University junior studying computer science and neuroscience, recently took a semester off to address some health concerns. When he recovered more quickly than expected, he did what many young scientists and engineers dream of doing: He created his own company.

Now he’s CEO of a start-up called Emozia with 10 employees, many of them also Binghamton students. “Entrepreneurship is a quintessential aspect of our education,” Vukasinovic says. “I’m 21. I haven’t even had a real job. And suddenly you’re thrown into a whirlwind.”

Scott Hancock, director of IP management and licensing at Binghamton, has seen rising interest in entrepreneurship among students and recent graduates. Vukasinovic, he says, is among the most indefatigable of the bunch. “He’s relentlessly upbeat,” Hancock says. “He’s fearless and not afraid to take chances in pursuit of his passion.”

Vukasinovic smiles broadly as he describes building his network, beginning on campus and continuing with a New York City meeting of the nonprofit StartOut, which fosters LGBT entrepreneurs. From there, it was on to the Founder Institute, which bills itself as the world’s largest start-up accelerator.

Emozia, Vukasinovic explains, will harvest data via a user’s phone to “learn” whether he or she is feeling happy, sad, irritable, stressed or tired. Sensors in the phone will do some of the work, in concert with data from the user’s apps and calendar. Emozia will then share this information with service providers and friends selected by the user.

The result? Upbeat music starts playing when she gets in the car after a miserable day in the office. The lights dim automatically when she’s getting ready to go to sleep. Her best friend gets an alert when she’s feeling down.

“Obviously, we are pushing boundaries,” says Vukasinovic, who also sees applications in gaming. “Our company is based on trust. This doesn’t work unless people trust us with their data. And users will control how information is shared.”

Facebook, he notes, makes money by selling information about users to advertisers. Emozia is different, at least in his view, because third-party service providers will have to convince users that they offer enough value that they should have access to personal information.

Vukasinovic would love to see Emozia grow into the next dot-com sensation. But he doesn’t fear failure. In fact, he’s already talking about what things will be like when he starts another company.

“What I’ve already learned,” he says, “is so amazingly valuable.”

Technology for the hearing-impaired is hardly perfect. The small microphones contained within hearing aids do a good job of boosting volume, but that can be a problem in a noisy restaurant as background sounds get boosted as much as your dinner date’s conversation. Miles used a tiny structure found in the ear of a fly, Ormia ochracea, as a model to develop the world’s smallest directional microphones.

His research received several million dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health nearly a decade ago, but that money was focused on scientific discovery and not on the development of a commercial product. Last year, the Research Foundation for the State University of New York (RF) supported development of the technology with $50,000 from the SUNY Technology Accelerator Fund (TAF). Now, Miles has earned an additional $100,000 from the fund to develop his microphone in a market-strategic way. Binghamton University will match that $100,000, providing additional resources to advance this research.

“As part of the review process, the RF team did a marketing study to determine potential markets for licensing and commercialization,” Miles says. “We ended up modifying our design to improve the marketability of our technology. By using a more conventional sensing scheme, it should be easier to commercialize.”

“Dr. Miles’ work is a perfect example of the real-world impact of SUNY research,” says Timothy Killeen, president of the RF and SUNY vice chancellor for research. “Ground-breaking research is being conducted by SUNY faculty and students across New York State. Our job is to provide the support that facilitates the advancement of invention to produce commercially viable technologies that serve the public good and trigger entrepreneurial and economic opportunity. Congratulations to Dr. Miles and his Binghamton University team.”

The Research Foundation launched the TAF in April 2011 to support innovation across the SUNY research community and to provide proof-of-concept funding for SUNY’s most promising technologies. In its first year, the fund produced two licensing agreements and three startup companies.

The TAF also recently announced first-round funding for an additional six projects proposed by SUNY researchers. Proposals were evaluated by the TAF managing director with input from external experts. The technologies selected include advancements in areas ranging from antibiotics to suicide prevention. Binghamton University bioengineer Kenneth McLeod had one of the winning proposals, with a plan to develop a personalized heating system that is designed to save energy while allowing people to manage their weight by maintaining a consistent body heat balance.

“Smart” micro-environmental systems keep employees in heat balance in the typical office environment. An infra-red based system heats people inside rooms in a building rather than blindly heating all spaces equally, whether occupied or not. Individuals obtain the comfort level they desire, resulting in improved productivity and decreased building operational costs. This “green” technology would reduce the energy needed to operate buildings, which accounts for 45 percent of all energy use in the U.S.

An equally important aspect of “radiant people heating” is that it triggers weight loss, McLeod says. This secondary benefit may provide even larger economic benefits to employers, employees and society. Building operators, engineers and architects can deploy micro-environmental control technology systematically to increase the economic and energy sustainability of their projects — and keeping people in buildings both comfortable and healthy.

Q: What gave you your start in entrepreneurship?

A: I have been a rebel all my life, and the reason is that I have found fault with the system all my life. I had to learn how to deal with the system because I couldn’t fight it. The answer was to learn how to be entrepreneurial — a creative problem-solver. I was entrepreneurial long before I became an entrepreneur.

My problem was finding an organization that would allow me to do this and not restrict me. I had one boss who did this, but once he left, my career was in jeopardy. The answer was to buy my own business. This doesn’t have to be the answer, though. It would be better if more organizations learned how to give their people freedom and maintain some control.

The best thing about entrepreneurship is the ability to create commerce or new solutions. That’s being entrepreneurial. As for being an entrepreneur, anyone can do it. It is especially easy if you inherit the business or money to buy it. I know a lot of entrepreneurs who are not very entrepreneurial.

But being entrepreneurial is not enough, nor is creating an organization that thrives on allowing people to be entrepreneurial. Effective personal leadership is also essential. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs are not the answer. They are just the latest silver bullet.

Q: Why do you see personal leadership as so vital?

A: The underlying cause of many problems we face in our society is the Big Bad Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy’s weakness is that it focuses on professional leadership with little attention given to personal leadership.

In my experience, bureaucracy exists in companies and organizations of all sizes. It exists where it is next to impossible to get to the decision-makers. It exists where rules and layers of management confine people.

Q: Can you give an example?

A: Years ago, I worked for a large company. What I found most surprising was how many rules there were — and how everyone knew how to break them. In fact, your boss would tell you how to break them. For example, I had to make an unexpected trip, and I needed some cash. I needed $150, but the rule was that to get more than $100 you had to submit a request to headquarters and wait about a week to get it. My boss told me to make out two requests for $75, and they gave me the money on the spot.

The rules were more important than doing the right thing. Actually, it was difficult to know what the right thing was. There was no discussion about mission and vision, customers or employee welfare, just rules. This method of operating has destroyed a lot of once-successful companies.

When I returned to school as a graduate student, I was amazed at how much the university and that company had in common. That’s when I realized that the problem was bureaucracy and not business, government or the size of an organization.

Q: How can these issues of bureaucracy be overcome?

A: The real solution lies in freedom with reasonable control. Give people the freedom to create but do not allow them to take advantage of the system, a system that has to have some moral structure. And this is the difficult part of good leadership: allowing freedom but maintaining overall control.

I have always said that I could never control our people at Adirondack Beverages, regardless of how hard I tried or which methods I employed. My partner used to say, “No one has enough money to watch their people all the time.” I would add that I don’t want to, nor do I have the time to do so.

Q: If people really can’t be controlled, how can a leader maintain order?

A: The key is buy-in. The way to get it is a win-win philosophy with a moral basis. The people win — financially and otherwise — when the organization wins and operates ethically and morally. What we did was focus on the right thing to do — our mission, vision, ethics, morals and our budget in time and money — and we gave our people a lot of leeway in the process. That’s the opposite of what so many large organizations do.

Business writer Tom Peters calls this “hard and soft” leadership. It’s hard on the organization’s values and soft on the process. The large organizations are soft on the values and hard on the process, which is what led to the recent disaster on Wall Street.

What we have right now in the United States, both in politics and in the corporate world, is a focus on doing things right with short-term goals and not on doing the right thing. All of this leads to a sort of reverse anarchy. We have a society in which the leaders are out of control and out of touch, and not the people. Effective personal leadership is the missing link.

“Where are the role models for women?” asks Gupta, an assistant professor of strategy at Binghamton University. “Pick up any book on entrepreneurship: It’s all about men. Switch on the TV, and when it comes to entrepreneurs, it is Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Where are the women entrepreneurs? They’re not being talked about.”

Of course, there have been many high-profile female entrepreneurs over the past half-century. The accomplishments of Oprah Winfrey, Estée Lauder, Mary Kay Ash and Debbi Fields are easily as impressive as those of Gates, Jobs, Richard Branson and Vidal Sassoon. But the failure to highlight the work of female entrepreneurs is exacerbated by societal stereotypes that often link entrepreneurship to masculine characteristics.

Gupta, who has devoted much of his research career to entrepreneurship, finds that gender stereotypes can discourage women from starting their own businesses, while gender-neutral messages prove most appealing to them.

“Some people say that the question of gender difference is timeless: It has always been there with us,” he says. “My research goes deeper into the question: Do men and women differ when it comes to entrepreneurship?”

Questions and answers

To help answer the question, Gupta and colleagues Daniel Turban at the University of Missouri and Nachiket Bhawe from the University of Minnesota distributed articles about attributes of entrepreneurs to more than 465 undergraduate business students who were divided into random groups.

“A lot of what we know about gender differences tends to be anecdotal or based on archival data, such as the Census,” Gupta says. “What we did was bring in the random-experiment approach, which is popular in fields like biology, medicine and agriculture.

“The nice thing about random experiments is that they take the guesswork from your analysis,” he says. “We said, ‘What if you gave a certain treatment to men and women who are randomly distributed in groups? What kinds of differences would you see based on the readings of the articles?’”

In the study, one group’s article simply said entrepreneurship could be best taught through business education. Another group was told that stereotypical male characteristics such as risk-taking and aggressiveness produce the best entrepreneurs. A third group received the female stereotype, reading that characteristics such as social skills and networking are key for entrepreneurship. Another group learned that the best entrepreneurs have characteristics of both men and women, such as creativity.

“You wouldn’t think there would be systematic entrepreneurial differences between men and women in these students,” Gupta says. “They were all business students exposed to the same knowledge and opportunities.”

Gupta and his colleagues determined that both men and women assimilated to the subtle reminders about social beliefs and entrepreneurship.

“When men and women were told that entrepreneurship is about male characteristics, men were more interested in becoming entrepreneurs,” he says. “Women were less interested in entrepreneurship. … It shows the power of the societal beliefs we have. When we are subconsciously exposed to them, it can affect the way we think.”

Women also showed little ambition for entrepreneurism after reading the female-stereotype article.

“When we presented the feminine information, nothing happened. Why? Because it is not consistent with what students are seeing and hearing in society about entrepreneurs,” Gupta says.
Women shared equal entrepreneurial aspirations with men only when the gender-neutral attributes were presented. The study, “The Effect of Gender Stereotype Activation on Entrepreneurial Intentions,” was published in 2008 in The Journal of Applied Psychology.

“We were surprised by how clear our results were about the effects of exposing people to those societal beliefs in subconscious ways,” he says.

An entrepreneurial upbringing

Entrepreneurship has had an impact on Gupta’s life since he was a young boy living in India.

“In many cases, entrepreneurship professors grew up around an entrepreneur who had a substantial influence in their life,” he says. “In my case, that someone was my father.”

Gupta’s father started as an entrepreneur at age 16, working in the machinery business in India.

“When the family got together for dinner or lunch, you heard entrepreneurial ideas and new ways to create value,” Gupta says. “That ends up having a lot of influence on your thinking.”

Gupta earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Punjab Technical University and was pursuing a master’s degree in industrial engineering in the United States when he met business professors at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business. “It gave me a new way of thinking about ideas,” he says. “That was the first important influence on me in the U.S.”

The business classes motivated Gupta to earn a doctorate in strategic management from the University of Missouri. Gupta began entrepreneurial research while pursuing his doctorate and soon became the driving force for incorporating gender issues, says Turban, chair of the Department of Management at the University of Missouri.

“He brings a lot of creativity, hard work and effort,” Turban says. “He is good at thinking about what to investigate and how to frame it. … Some of the attributes that are particularly important are that he has a lot of drive and motivation that are coupled with ability and curiosity.”

Gupta joined Binghamton University’s faculty in 2008. “When I first joined academia, my father said, ‘What are you doing? Do something useful with your life,’” Gupta says. “For him, academia wasn’t practical. Now he sees that I haven’t lost my practical orientation. He realizes that academia doesn’t take you away from being practical. You can do both.”

Making the changes

Changing the way entrepreneurship is discussed starts not only with reaching young people, but also by always presenting it as an option for men and women.

“We never explicitly say that (entrepreneurship) is for men and not women,” Gupta says. “But implicitly, that’s what we are signaling. How? By emphasizing masculine characteristics.”

Gupta points to arguably the most popular television show with an entrepreneurial focus, Donald Trump’s The Apprentice.

“What that show is doing is turning women away from being entrepreneurs because they’re looking at it and thinking, ‘That’s not me,’” Gupta says. “It so blatantly emphasizes those stereotypical masculine characteristics. “When I watch TV, I have to work really hard to find role models for my female students, especially business role models.”

Even when there is a successful female entrepreneur, the media can still present her in a negative light, Gupta says. One such example is a movie about Martha Stewart called Martha, Inc.
“If you saw that movie, you would not want your daughter to be an entrepreneur,” Gupta says. “They show Martha Stewart as selfish and only looking out for herself at an early age. That’s a big problem. You have to emphasize that entrepreneurs are people who contribute positively to the economy and society.”

Gupta also would like to see the stories of female entrepreneurs “front and center” in textbooks with an emphasis on success “while retaining their feminine identity.” One place where that can be seen is in Gupta’s home country of India, where 14 percent of women are entrepreneurs, compared to 8 percent in the United States.

Gupta and his colleagues conducted a similar gender-entrepreneurship study in India in 2009. Unlike in the United States, emphasizing female characteristics had a positive influence on Indian women’s views of entrepreneurship. While India has greater perceived gender differences and barriers to women in business, it has had female heads of state and the female characteristics are consistent with successful business leaders in the Indian culture.

But Gupta worries that the expanding popularity of Western television shows could eventually affect Indian women’s attitudes toward entrepreneurship. “Maybe as our TV shows diffuse through their society, they will end up in the same position as us,” he says. “The power of TV shows such as Friends is such that Indian kids would rather watch the show than actually be with their friends. It’s unfortunate that the media can have so much power over how we think and act.”

Gupta plans to further analyze Hollywood’s role in entrepreneurship. He has identified movies that deal with the subject and hopes to answer the question: Can movies with female entrepreneurs reduce some of the differences in men’s and women’s interest in becoming entrepreneurs? Educators, scholars and activists can all learn lessons from the gender-entrepreneurship research, Gupta says, ranging from the need to promote role models to the power of random experiments in examining the challenges that lie ahead.

“Social beliefs, especially about gender roles and professions, are very entrenched in society,” he says. “They can change, but they take a long time to change. If we want to change the gender image of entrepreneurship, it won’t be an easy job.”