Small Business: Building America's Future. Results of Three-Year Commercialization Study of the SBIR Program

摘要

Through the help of funding from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program, small hi-tech enterprises propose their innovative ideas to help solve federal hi-tech problems and in turn produce commercially viable products, processes and technologies. Realizing that commercialization is often difficult to define and categorize, the U.S. Small Business Administration designed a multi-year study to evaluate the extent to which Program awardees are successfully marketing the results of their research and development efforts. Over a three-year period, telephone surveys were conducted on 834 projects which had received funding in the first three years of the Program. Then to assess how commercialization might increase over time, follow-on surveys were conducted during the second and third years of the study. The study showed that 18 percent of awardees were experiencing some commercial success four years after receiving Program funding to follow up on original proposals. The study also included the prediction that 27 percent of awardees would realize some commercial success six years after receiving their follow-up funding. The study also showed the importance of the SBIR Program to the commercialization successes. More than 60 percent of the respondents attributed nearly all of their project's success to SBIR. And 84 percent said their technology development would not have been pursued without SBIR assistance.