Absolutely! I had the pleasure to participate with the Bleed Freeze team in the NSF I-Corps program. The team did over 100 customer interviews, to finally nail the customer-value fit. The video shows their lessons learned from this experience.

You may ask, are 100 customer interviews a valuable way to spent my busy time as physician? I certainly think so. I applaud Elizabeth Phillips, who is an Emergency Room Physician, for initiating and participating in most of these interviews in between her (night) shifts, and Romil Patel, a biomedical engineering for diligently recording all the lessons learned from these interviews and presenting these findings to the teaching team each week.

In sum, participating in an I-corps program will make your idea better. In addition, it will provide you with a fabulous network of mentors and others who can help you move forward faster and in the right direction.

Many universities run local chapters, in which you can participate for free. If you are a holder of an NSF grant, you can apply for the NSF I-Corps version, which provides a $50,000 grant for customer discovery.

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