DARPA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR): Topics

acq.osd.mil

14 points·phugoid··6 comments

Don't forget to other funding agencies besides DARPA: http://www.acq.osd.mil/osbp/sbir/solicitations/sbir093/index... as well as the STTR program: http://www.acq.osd.mil/osbp/sbir/solicitations/sttr09B/index...

The SBIR grants money to small businesses, about $100K for Phaise I (six months) and $750K for Phase II (two years). The STTR is for collaborations between a small business and a research institution (e.g. university).

In this batch of solicitations, I have seen a solicitation for "Computational Models of Leadership" as well as a STTR on GPU/CUDA computing.

During the pre-release period (i.e. now) you can communicate directly with the topic authors. This is a technique you can use to establish rapport with the topic authors, which makes them more comfortable funding someone they've never funded before.

SBIRs are like crack. It's easy money, but then you get on a government delivery cycle and standards.

I wouldn't touch them at a startup.

The company for which I work is currently in a situation where we make most of our money from SBIRs. Any suggestions for breaking out of that cycle?

Put all your resources into either selling something to someone besides the government, or making something you can sell.

IRobot can sell their military robots to people like the police, and the roomba side of course.

The alternative is going whole hog and getting more money from congress outside the sbir process. Then you're a defense contractor.

I suppose an update to that story is in order. We didn't get some big IT contract we needed and so we let a couple of our employees go. I was one of the two.

Search for "SB093-004" to jump to the software-related stuff.

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