GW is helping to launch a program this fall that will allow scientific research to be commercialized in Canada.

Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada is working with GW to develop Canada’s first Innovation Corps program. The Atlantic Canada’s I-Corps program will train scientists to think differently about their research and turn their discoveries into commercial products, officials said this week in an article in the Business Herald.

The program will be accessible to academics in Atlantic Canada. Scientists in the program will team up with both an entrepreneur and a graduate student to manage a lab and learn how to bring products to the market, program officials said in the article.

Mary Kilfoil, a professor of entrepreneurship at Dalhousie University, told the Business Herald that they partnered with GW to get help training their staff and starting the pilot program.

“The plan is to work with George Washington University over the next two years because they are certified NSF I-Corp trainers,” Kilfoil said.

The D.C.-area I-Corps program was awarded $3.45 million by the National Science Foundation to renew their program last year.

Steve Blank, one of the creators of I-Corps who teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkley, said that he was surprised Canada didn’t already have an I-Corps program.

“I’ve been a little bit blown away by how much good science there is here,” Blank told the Business Herald. “It’s almost a criminal waste that there isn’t already an I-Corps here in Canada.”

Blank said that this program has the ability to expand the outreach of scientific discoveries.

“It can improve science and scientists,” Blank said. “Once they are exposed to these ideas it changes everyone in their team for the next 20 years.”