Dr. Lisa Friis first went through I-Corps in 2012. More than a decade later, she came back to the program but this time with a new team and technology concept to lead through the process. She expected to find it familiar, but in reality, she found it transformational.
For many amputees, the challenges don’t end with learning to use a prosthetic limb. They continue every single day, in ways that most people never see and in a healthcare system is poorly equipped to address their needs. Existing solutions leave significant gaps, particularly for those whose underlying health conditions make them most vulnerable to serious complications.
Dr. Friis is a professor and chair of mechanical engineering at the University of Kansas, with over 25 years of research experience and a focus in recent years on technology designed to support amputees. She came into the program with deep expertise, a promising product concept, and an idea of who her customer was. I-Corps helped her see the picture more clearly.
“Before I-Corps, I believed our customer and market was any amputee,” Dr. Friis said. “After I-Corps, we discovered that our market could be any amputee, but it’s primarily targeted at amputees who are also diabetics. The problems that amputees with diabetes have are just heart-wrenching, and they don’t have solutions for many of those problems.”
This customer shift didn’t happen in a single moment. It emerged gradually through conversations with amputees and their healthcare providers as patterns began to surface in what people were sharing. By the time the team had spoken with their third amputee, something was becoming clear. The experiences of diabetic amputees were distinct, the stakes were higher, and the gap between what they needed and what existed was wider than Dr. Friis had anticipated. “We realized that our product could address even more of the issues that they were having,” she said. “That was a really cool realization we had over time.”
What made the discovery process particularly meaningful for Dr. Friis is that she isn’t new to I-Corps. She has been incorporating customer discovery principles into her teaching and research programs since she first completed I-Corps in 2012. She returned this time to experience it again alongside her team and found it even more valuable than she expected. “It was more beneficial than I anticipated,” she said. “It’s really energized me for the program as well as our product.”
That energy is translating into action. Dr. Friis had already scheduled a sabbatical for the fall to focus on moving the technology forward, and the team is preparing a federal grant proposal for September 2026. When asked how she would describe the regional I-Corps program to other faculty and graduate students, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s a great way to look at your research and your translational ideas through a different lens and figure out very early on how you should best be proceeding with those ideas to really help people the most.”