I just searched "CNC", a bunch of contract opportunities showed up: https://sam.gov/search/?index=opp&sort=-modifiedDate&page=1&...
I urge everyone to study WWII history. Overnight, they converted button/zip manufacturers to making carbureator parts for Airplanes. Literally, overnight. At 8pm, they were producing mother of pearl buttons. By noon next day, they were making first batch of pins for the deflector plate.
Today's generation has no clue what happens in trying times. They need to study history to see what really happened, almost overnight.
I asked what the benefit would be of funding private enterprises that private enterprises are already willing to fund. And he provided a nonsensical spiel about WW2-era policies without explaining why those policies were necessary today, given that private enterprises are already willing to spend the money to fund those activities.
His suggestion would result in massive amounts of fraud and wealthy techbros getting free toys they don't need from the U.S. government courtesy of their fellow taxpayers.
I read a lot of WW2 history, but not about the manufacturing part. Any good books you’d recommend?
There’s an entire service industry around helping businesses apply. The companies that I’ve seen be successful at it hired several people with SBIR experience specifically to handle the grant proposals.
I had 3 successful NSF proposals and could not have done it without an experienced team helping me just with the legalese and process.
My partner reached out to a few small business development centers but, while they were very eager to help, we ultimately received only very minor feedback and a general thumbs up. I'd say in the two years it took us to hone a winning technical proposal, my partner was able to become somewhat of an expert in the rules. During that time we also applied for a non-SBIR government grant, unsuccessfully, where we lost a lot of points for being a 2-man team. If you're willing to put in the time, it's very doable to write an application which follows the rules.
In fact, I'd say one thing we ran into was finding ourselves "inventing" rules because we were overly cautious with our compliance to what we thought were the rules. The application truly is the most difficult part of compliance for a SBIR Phase I.
The problems with our Phase I were purely technical. We weren't able to advance the state-of-the-art enough to be able to write a convincing commercialization plan. And I don't think there was any consulting firm we could have hired to fix that problem.