If you’re a small business, SBIR/STTR can be an important source of funding. Below is some useful advice if you’re preparing an application or thinking of doing so.
Depending on the area in which you work and your resources, your approach to your application may be different. We’ve sorted applicants into 3 basic types below.
Some of the most successful applicants aren’t waiting for SBIR/STTR to release topics; they’re planting the seeds of their own. They use their relationships across various government departments and agencies to see whitepapers on the government’s needs. They then make suggestions to the right people, and work with them to create their own SBIR topics. Instead of hunting timelines, they constantly plant the seeds of new topics and ideas.
Different agencies have different due dates, but what really matters is whether or not their topics change. The applicants in this category tend to stick with either the always-open SBIRs, or with agencies like the National Science Foundation, Health and Human Services, and the Department of Energy and the Air Force Dual use SBIR, whose topics may evolve, but do so within well-defined parameters, and thus seldom change radically. This means that applicants are never more than 4 months, at most, away from an application due date, as they don’t have to switch focus from one topic to another with every funding cycle.
These applicants tend to focus on departments and agencies whose topics are generally released 30 days before proposals are due. The exception here is DOD which pre-releases their topics 30 days before the official release date. The purpose of this is to offer more time for vendors to communicate with and ask questions to the government. As topics seldom change after pre-release, the DOD essentially gives applicants 60 days to build their proposals.