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Venture Funding and the NIH SBIR Program
we seek to illuminate the ramifications of the SBA ruling on the participation of majority-owned venture capital based firms in the SBIR program.
The analysis in this report complements the Academies’ recent assessment of the SBIR program at NIH, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, NASA and the National Science Foundation.45 Covering the approximately twenty years of the program’s existence (over which period, the restrictions of the SBA ruling were not in place) this comprehensive study found that the program is meeting its congressional objectives and is effective in practice. Moreover, the Academies’ study did not detect any effect (positive or negative) from the participation of a limited but significant number of small innovative firms that were majority owned by venture capital firms in the SBIR program.46
45
For a summary report of this first comprehensive assessment of the SBIR program, see National Research Council, An Assessment of the SBIR Program, op. cit.
46
See National Research Council, An Assessment of the SBIR Program at the National Institutes ofHealth, op. cit., Chapter 2, Finding G on “Venture Funding and SBIR.”
