SBIR Proposal Writing Basics

SBIR Proposal Writing Basics: Convincing the Reviewer that this Project MUST be Funded

Gail & Jim Greenwood, Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

In earlier articles, we have differentiated the agencies that make their SBIR/STTR awards as grants vs those who make them as contracts. The former support "good ideas" with their SBIR/STTR money, while the latter support projects that address specific issues and problems of concern to the contract agencies.

With a contract agency, there’s not a lot of question as to what is a "good idea," because they tend to tell you pretty specifically what problem they want you to address and sometimes even how they think you might approach the solution. But when it comes to the grant agencies, you don’t tend to get this guidance. For the grant agency, you have to answer two questions, namely "what makes this a ‘good idea’ that our agency should support?" and "why should our agency give priority to this ‘good idea’ over the next SBIR/STTR proposer’s ‘good idea?’"

Several factors play into the question of why the agency should support a particular good idea. One is whether the idea is relevant to the agency: for example, National Science Foundation, one of the larger SBIR/STTR agencies that makes grant awards, states clearly that they will support homeland security projects but not those involving military or defense applications. Another factor is whether the project would be considered "good research" by other researchers in places like universities. Why? Because many grant agencies rely on external reviewers to evaluate their SBIR/STTR proposals, and those external reviewers come predominantly from universities. Therefore, you may have some real problems getting funding for an idea that flies in the face of what is deemed to be "good" to researchers from mainstream university environments. A third factor is whether the technical approach, and the team of researchers that will carry it out, are credible and sound. A final factor is whether this project leads to a reasonable commercialization opportunity—remembering that the SBIR and STTR programs focus on projects with commercialization potential, a "good idea" can be one that goes beyond being an interesting R&D project and presents a legitimate opportunity to become part of a product or service (and don’t forget that grant agencies almost never are a Phase III customer).

The second question, whether this project deserves priority over other SBIR/STTR projects, is equally important. It is well known that SBIR and STTR are very competitive programs, and agencies routinely receive more "good idea" proposals than they can afford to fund. The goal is to go beyond being one of the "good idea" proposals and be a project that is so compelling that it MUST be funded in the eyes of the agency. To accomplish this, we recommend focusing on the impact that your project could have. That impact could be saving money, saving lives, reducing pain and suffering, saving important institutions like the family farm, reducing errors, reducing segregation and racial profiling, eliminating illiteracy, reducing dependence on scare resources like foreign oil or highly skilled labor—hopefully you get the idea. Better yet, it should have impact in more than one area: for example, "not only will this reduce the number of false negatives for patients who have this test, but it also will allow hospitals to utilize less skilled workers in administering the test and analyzing results."

An SBIR/STTR proposal to a grant agency, then, needs to be a sales document that professionally but clearly answers these two questions. Starting with the abstract and continuing through the commercialization discussion, the proposal must leave reviewers with the conclusions that "this is a great idea, and if we fund this great idea it will have a significant impact." If you can accomplish this, you will increase your chances of getting an award from an SBIR/STTR grant agency.