The Small Business Innovation Research Program An Assessment of the Department of Defense Fast Track Initiative (2000) / Chapter Skim
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An Assessment of the Small Business Innovation Research Fast Track Program in the Southeastern States
An Assessment of the Small Business Innovation Research Fast Track Program in the Southeastern States
Pages 194-210
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From page 194... ...
award recipients in southeastern states. The focus of the case studies was to determine, to the extent possible, if the Fast Track Initiative encourages more rapid commercialization of research results through the acquisition of private investment capital, and if Fast Track projects progress more rapidly than standard SBIR awards.
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NAS STRATEGY FOR COLLECTION OF INFORMATION NAS was asked by DoD to determine, to the extent possible, · if the Fast Track Initiative encourages more rapid commercialization of research results through the acquisition of private investment capital, and · if Fast Track projects progress more rapidly than do the standard SBIR awards. Toward that end, a team of researchers was assembled, and each was assigned a different region of the country from which to identify a sample of Fast Track program awardees and non-Fast Track program awarders.
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These six firms are shown in the upper portion of Table 1. NAS requested that 12 case studies be conducted in southeastern states, six non-Fast Track firms were thus selected for the purpose of comparison.
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INDICATIONS OF COMMERCIAL IMPACTS ASSOCIATED WITH FAST TRACK PROJECTS None of the firms interviewed has commercialized a product or process that was associated with the Phase II award under study. This absence of direct commercialization success was expected a priori because the Fast Track Initiative is a relatively young program and there are few firms that have even completed their Phase II study.
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Based on the data in Table 3, it appears that the reduced funding gap associated with Fast Track firms is not related to the expected duration from the end of Phase II to commercialization. Hence, one cannot conclude that these Fast Track firms expect to commercialize faster than the non-Fast Track firms.
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All of the non-Fast Track firms eventually expect to obtain third-party funding. Two of these six firms reported that they do not yet have a commercialization strategy, but anticipate developing one when outside funding is obtained.
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None of the six Fast Track PIs made such a statement; in fact, all Fast Track PIs were of the opinion that employment growth due specifically to the Phase II project would be permanent. tone should not generalize about the average employment size of an SBIR Fast Track firm compared to a non-Fast Track firm on the basis of the employment data in Table 1 because the comparable six non-Fast Track firms included in this study were selected, in part, on the basis of the number of employees.
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All 12 interviewed firms expected to seek additional SBIR research support in the future. The six Fast Track firms anticipated applying again through the Fast Track program, and the six non-Fast Track firms were uncertain about their future use of Fast Track.
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. For each project, two rates of return are shown in Table 8: a private rate of return absent SBIR support under the counterfactual situation in which the research was undertaken, and a lower bound on the social rate of return associated with the SBIR-sponsored project.
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CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS The descriptive information presented in this paper indicates that in some dimensions Fast Track firms and programs are different from non-Fast Track firms and programs. However, the southeastern states sample studied and summarized herein is too small to infer more definite conclusions.
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COMMENT: Absent SBIR funding, Matis likely would have taken on this project on a limited scale. Although the capital and labor costs to undertake this research are extraordinarily high, Matis has previous investment relationships with companies and could acquire partial funding.
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COMMENT: Because of the high capital costs for this research and the lack of available funding sources, this research would not have been undertaken in the absence of the SBIR award. Outside investors would not have been interested because the market is so small, and the technology can be imitated quickly.
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PROJECT: Very-Low-Bit-Rate-Error-Resilient Video Communication. PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Andrew Yin, President of the company; RePROlECT SUMMARY: The lack of available bandwidth is the technical constraint on video imaging, especially wireless video imaging.
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There are software packages on the market to assist in the design of test facilities, but they are generic in their abilities and thus are not sophisticated enough to meet the needs of ducted rocket facilities. COMMENT: The company considered applying to the Fast Track program but could not find investors.
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The output of the Phase II research is a commercializable software package that incorporates the algorithms developed. COMMENT: Commercial potential is far off and there could not be investors or borrowed money absent SBIR.
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Principal Investigator: Chris McGraw, President of the company; Computer PROJECT SUMMARY: As computers have moved from a supercomputer mainframe environment to a "distributed paradigm" where desktop computers are networked, a problem has arisen as to how best to share the processing loads across components in the network so as to maximize the efficiency of the network. This is not an interoperability problem; it is an ex post workload problem.
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PRINCIPAE INVESTIGATOR: David Goldstein, President of the company; Computer Science. PROJECT SUMMARY: Software is being developed in an interactive way to develop Web pages.
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