Research to Practice (R2P): Creating a Blueprint for Facilitating Innovation in Occupational Health and Safety

The NEC launched a new research project to understand how we can increase the number and pace of health and safety innovations adopted by workers in farming, forestry, and fishing. In partnership with George Mason University (GMU), NEC staff are identifying the elements needed in a research-to-practice incubator. To do this, we have developed a competitive funding process that offers $10,000 of annual funding for two years to an individual or organization with an innovative idea to improve the health or safety of loggers, commercial fishermen, or farmers. We have established an advisory board of experts in engineering, marketing, entrepreneurship, standards and measurement, user design and testing, venture capital, patent law, insurance, and industry representatives to help us with project selection (2023 and 2025) and process feedback.

At the end of 2023, we selected the first of the two projects. Farrell Davis is both a sea scallop fishing deckhand and a technology researcher, and he has proposed developing a more ergonomic shucking knife. Working from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Farrell has been moving his project forward. Courtesy of one of our board members, Ken Rother, from the Cornell University I-Corps program, Farrell attended the one-month-long regional I-Corps customer discovery course, which introduced him to the entrepreneurial mindset and how to identify the problems that customers need to solve. Farrell has been working with the team on finalizing a survey to conduct with scallop shuckers, which he will use with a crew in mid-August and continue through the fall. Farrell is working with incubator chair Leigh McCue-Weil from GMU to test 3-D printing materials as part of the survey.