Abstract
Purpose Designed to accelerate delivery of translational technologies, The Innovation Fellows (IF) Program at the Center for Medical Innovation blends experiential learning, competency-building, and industry engagement to prepare early-career engineers, clinicians, and scientists for diverse professional pathways, including entrepreneurship, industry, and clinical translation. Fellows consist of senior graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and medical trainees engaged in translational engineering and health science research. Methods Anchored in the NSF I-Corps™ framework, this year-long program enhances traditional academic training with structured commercialization experience and a distinctive three-tier mentoring model: an internal subject matter expert, an internal innovation mentor, and an external industry mentor. This triad mentoring approach supports fellows in translating research into market-ready solutions, while fostering critical professional competencies such as interdisciplinary collaboration, stakeholder communication, and coachability. Fellows engage in customer discovery interviews, regulatory pathway analysis, and iterative project refinement, guided by mentors drawn from both academic and industry sectors. A flipped-classroom structure and discovery-driven curriculum position fellows to explore alternative career pathways while staying in academia. Fellows complete pre- and post-program assessments and reflection protocols to evaluate growth in areas such as networking, intellectual property, and strategic planning. Results Early data from two cohorts show significant gains in commercialization confidence and cross-sector communication skills. Conclusions This paper presents the structure and early outcomes of the IF Program as a replicable model for integrating workforce-aligned mentoring and industry partnerships into early career biomedical engineering education, while broadening trainees’ professional horizons and accelerating the impact of biomedical innovation.