George Mason University

George Mason University (GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia. Established in 1957 as the Northern Virginia branch of the University of Virginia, it became an independent university in 1972 and has since grown to become the largest four-year public university in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The university is named for the Founding Father George Mason, a Virginia planter and politician who authored the Virginia Declaration of Rights that later influenced the future Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. Mason operates four campuses in Virginia (Fairfax, Arlington, Front Royal, and Prince William), as well as a campus in South Korea.

The university is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". It is particularly well known in the fields of economics and law and economics. Two George Mason economics professors have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics: James M. Buchanan in 1986 and Vernon L. Smith in 2002.

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Mason I-Corps is the university’s NSF-supported program for researchers, students, staff, faculty, founders, and alumni who want to test the commercial potential of a research idea or technology. Mason says the program trains teams in customer discovery and technology-problem fit, and its site program works with exploratory ventures started by Mason affiliates. ICAP is the program umbrella Mason uses for commercialization help, and I-Corps is the NSF-oriented customer discovery track inside that ecosystem. That relationship is stated directly on Mason pages that describe ICAP as Mason’s official regional I-Corps short course and reference I-Corps alongside ICAP in Mason entrepreneurship programming.