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Using Extant Data to Understand Impact and Reach by Emily Markese and Adam Blandford

Hello! We are Emily Markese and Adam Blandford, evaluators from VentureWell’s Data Intelligence Team. VentureWell is a national nonprofit headquartered in Hadley, Massachusetts, that specializes in funding, training, and cultivating a pipeline of science and technology inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Together with our partners, we are driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges and create positive social and environmental impact.

At VentureWell, we have worked with higher education institutions (HEIs) for over 25 years. Part of our mission is to increase the diversity of those in STEM and partner with students and faculty from Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and other Emerging Research Institutions (ERIs). To achieve this goal, we need to know a few things across our multiple programs:

  1. Which institutions have we served?
  2. Which institutions have we not served?
  3. What are the characteristics of those institutions we have and have not served? How well are MSIs and ERIs represented? 

Fortunately, we live in an era where data is more readily available than ever. While this can be overwhelming, it can also make our evaluation findings richer. For example, the Department of Education’s (DOE) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is our go-to source for institutional information, where we can learn about their size, composition, offerings, and more. The DOE also maintains data on MSI status, published here. These resources have been invaluable in our quest to understand the institutions we are serving and those we are not reaching, and we regularly integrate these data into our data management system. 

As part of our funding, training, and cultivating of science and technology inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs, we have been fortunate to work with companies that are raising funding, selling products, and operating as businesses. One way we can understand how our programs affect participants and their businesses is to track their entrepreneurship outcomes after our programming. For many companies, we have been able to utilize sources like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) database, and firms like Pitchbook to identify when teams reach new milestones, such as being awarded a patent or raising funding through the SBIR program. 

When these companies apply for funding, they indicate if they have received funding from elsewhere, giving our data system the information it needs to see when one of ‘our’ companies reaches those milestones. 

These are a few examples of how we have utilized extant data to advance our mission. Resources like IPEDS, the USPTO, SBIR/STTR programs, and others have afforded us a much greater understanding of the diversity of our partners, our context, and our impact.

Rad Resources:

Come back tomorrow to see our blog post on inclusive innovation!


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