The required Project Pitch allows startups and small businesses to get quick feedback at the start of their application for Phase I funding from America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF.
Startups or entrepreneurs who submit a Project Pitch* will find out if they meet the program’s objectives to support innovative technologies that show promise of commercial and/or societal impact and involve a level of technical risk. They will also get additional guidance and feedback from NSF staff.
If your Project Pitch is a good fit for the program, you will receive an official invitation from NSF to submit a full proposal. If you’re not invited to submit, you’ll be told why your project is not appropriate for the program.
Along with your company information, you’ll have to outline four key elements in your Project Pitch:
1. The Technology Innovation. (Up to 500 words)
Describe the technical innovation that would be the focus of a Phase I project, including a brief discussion of the origins of the innovation as well as explanation as to why it meets the program’s mandate to focus on supporting
Our company proposes a SaaS-based AI-enabled education platform to increase participation of parents and community members and accelerate personalized learning. The platform will leverage AI to enable crowd-sourced curriculum generation through AI-assisted content creation, remix, and sharing. It will also provide recommendations to find the content and learning profile matches.
Use AI to co-create curriculum:
Develop tools to enhance the content and look of a curriculum
AI to check how much it is meeting the school standard
Source learning and education materials from other open source
Create, Merge, Enhance, Share curriculum
Use AI to match learning profile with curriculum profile
Define profiles: individual vs. small group; instructional vs. facilitation; hands-on vs. non hands-on; $ budget, Time budget,
Learner Profile:
Facilitator Profile:
Curriculum Profile:
ChatGPT, recommend curriculum based on questions asked
Data lake, find patterns
2. The Technical Objectives and Challenges. (Up to 500 words)
Describe the R&D or technical work to be done in a Phase I project, including a discussion of how and why the proposed work will help prove that the product or service is technically feasible and/or significantly reduce technical risk. Discuss how, ultimately, this work could contribute to making the new product, service, or process commercially viable and impactful. This section should also convey that the proposed work meets the definition of R&D, rather than straightforward engineering or incremental product development tasks.
3. The Market Opportunity. (Up to 250 words)
Describe the customer profile and pain point(s) that will be the near-term commercial focus related to this technical project.
Go To Market Strategy
Customers: Enterprises and Community Organizations
Users: Parents and Community members
Pain Point:
(1) One size does NOT fit all: The current education system requires that individual student needs to adapt his/her learning to accommodate big group learning. This often results in lost opportunity to identify learning gaps in their areas of struggle and learning extension in areas of interests and talents.
(2) Decreased supply of teachers: Rich curricula, lots of Professional Development opportunities, and many research papers have been published in the area to help teachers solve problem identifies in (1). However, with more and more teachers leaving the profession, it becomes clear that we must solve the supply problem. Who else can help with students’ learning? Parents.
(3) Societal impact: What are taught in schools fall behind how fast the world is involving.
(4) Hurdles in parents engaged learning:
Parents usually lack skills in working with children.
They may not have the expertise to teach a certain content.
What do they have?
They have the motivation to help their children reach their potentials.
They have the capacity to learn the skills needed to help their children succeed.
They desire to build solid relationships with their children.
Post COVID, more parents have the flexibility to devote some more time to help their children with learning at home with their friends
They are flexible, they iterate faster
(5) Supplies
part-timers want to help out, to substitute
Business Model:
Subscription:
Commission:
4. The Company and Team. (Up to 250 words)
Describe the background and current status of the applicant small business, including key team members who will lead the technical and/or commercial efforts discussed in this Project Pitch.
. More details about the NSF’s new process and eligibility requirements are on our Apply page.
*Each small business can only submit one Project Pitch at a time. Any small business with a pending Project Pitch must wait for a response before submitting another Project Pitch. Any small business that has received an invitation to submit a full proposal must wait for a resolution of the full proposal before submitting a new or revised Project Pitch.
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NSF Pitch Doc