What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? A Strategic Assessment of an Incubator Program

For over five years, the Michigan State University Libraries Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) has partnered with Digital Humanities at MSU to offer a Project Incubator program that provides participants an opportunity to advance a digital scholarship project in the early stages of development. Through a series of trainings, participants learn about the life cycle of digital scholarship projects, digital tools and methodologies, research data management, and project management. Woven throughout are craft workshops and co-working sessions where participants receive in-depth feedback, connections with experts, and dedicated work time. Since 2020, the program has supported eighteen projects, many of them with global reach and audiences, and still others, created by indigenous faculty and students for their communities and families. For all its strengths, the Project Incubator program raises the question: After a project is incubated, then what? Or to put it another way, what infrastructures, programs, and services must be cultivated to best support participants across the entire project lifecycle? In this presentation we engage with this question by sharing the findings of a strategic assessment of current and past participants in the Project Incubator. Using an Appreciative Inquiry framework, we conducted a survey and interviews with participants to surface program strengths and barriers that restrict work on their projects. Additionally, we adapted a digital project lifecycle model to assess the current state of projects that have come out of the program. By sharing this presentation, we seek to offer insights for others working to establish similar programs, services, and infrastructures at their home institutions. We also seek feedback from this community about how we can better attract and encourage participants and projects that engage with global, indigenous, and/or underrepresented communities.