For high-technology entrepreneurs, there is another source of financing that can be as generous as it is little known: grants from the federal government’s Small Business Innovative Research Program.The biggest fund, by far, is run by the Defense Department, which parcels out some $1 billion a year to independent companies with fewer than 500 employees. The goal is to stimulate research into novel technologies that can benefit military operations, but with a twist. The department is not paying for exclusivity for the ideas it finances; rather, it wants those ideas to go commercial as quickly as possible to assure a stream of reliable and cost-effective suppliers.
Bill Sellers on November 5th, 2004 at 3:02 pm
SBIRs are competitive…the National SBIR Conference just concluded yesterday, running all week in Boise. If one accepts the premise we’re in a globally competitive environment, with major sections of the US economic infrastructure being wacked routinely by China & India, et al….it makes sense that the US govt should begin to help out. In fact, what has begun to transpire, to the great chagrin of US free-trade & other laissez-faire economic ideologs, who think this process is without consequence….is that the great repositories of US high-technology: DoD, DoE, USDA, NASA, NIH, NSF, the Universities, etc, etc have discovered “techXfer”…i.e. technology-transfer commercialization.
Be close to those places…DC [of course] Albuquerque [Sandia, Los Alamos], Bay area [Misc], TriCities WA {PNL], Idaho Falls [INL] Knoxville [ORNL]…that’s where this process, aided by SBIRs etc is taking us.