Guidebook
Ultimately, this guidebook is a resource to support your work beyond the NSF CIVIC grant. As alluded to in the Introduction and as the Self Assessment Analysis may indicate, you might consider different paths forward for your project, depending on which elements of your project are the strongest today. For instance:
Guidebook Tools
View resources by opening the sections below.
You can use the following resources as a guide for
improvement based on your Self Assessment Analysis, but also as a broader educational
series for best practices around product development, business strategies, partnership
development, and stakeholder and community engagement.
Please note that NSF does
not endorse any of the resources included below, but have included them as
representative examples of core elements you should consider when thinking about the
sustainability, transferability, and scalability aspects of your work.
The product development resources below are intended to help you build and refine your project’s core value proposition. While some aspects of product development might be most helpful for those “pivoting” or going back to the drawing board, other aspects describe processes and competencies that projects should revisit and continually refine–like market segmentation and product testing.
Defining your product
Product/Market Fit Analysis
If your project is scalable but is struggling to achieve sustainability, building partnership might help your team get to your target users more easily, or even carry the project forward to scale without your continued involvement through licensing. The resources below are intended to help you find the right partners for your project, build great relationships and facilitate ongoing communication, or to help you navigate the process of licensing your project to another partner entirely.
Building Partnerships
Partnering with Local Government
Accountability & Change Management
In some cases, your partnership might be neither sustainable nor scalable–but that doesn’t mean it is unimportant. The best way to help other communities learn from your experience might be through written or verbal storytelling, the development of a great case study, or taking an open-source approach to documenting and sharing everything from a business case or standard operating procedure to sharing code. The NSF and MetroLab teams can also be great resources going forward.
NSF/MetroLab Resources
The business strategy resources below are likely to be most helpful for projects that plan to commercialize by creating and growing a startup. However, all projects can benefit from learning more about how and when to pivot.