Gail & Jim Greenwood, Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

Copyright © 2004 by Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

Over the years, we have written several times about the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program. Many of you already know that STTR is the younger (and much smaller) sibling to the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, and that STTR requires that the small firm submitting the proposal be teamed with a university, non profit research entity, or Federally Funded Research and Development Center (aka FFRDC, and sometimes generally referred to as "Federal Lab" although not all Federal Labs are FFRDCs—see our 2003 article regarding FFRDCs vs. Federal Labs at http://g-jgreenwood.home.att.net).

With technology transfer in the name, you should rightly expect that STTR involve the transfer of technology. Most of the Federal agencies that participate in STTR take a pretty liberal view of what constitutes tech transfer within an STTR project. However, in the new SBIR/STTR solicitation from NASA, it is appears that agency has a more specific definition. We want to highlight this, both to help anyone who is applying to NASA for an STTR, and to show others one way that technology can be transferred within an STTR, regardless of what agency to which the proposal is submitted.

Quoting from the FY2004 NASA SBIR/STTR solicitation, "All Phase I [STTR] proposals must provide sufficient information to convince NASA that the proposed [Small Business/Research Institution] cooperative effort represents a sound approach for converting technical information resident at the [Research Institution] into a product or service that meets a need described in a Solicitation research topic." There are a number of juicy items in this quote on which we could focus, but for now we’re interested in "converting technical information resident at the [Research Institution] into a product or service."

The unique feature in NASA’s STTR program, as briefly explained in this excerpt, is that this agency expects the small company to find technology/algorithms/prototypes/widgets/concepts/code/etc within a university or FFRDC that meets one of NASA’s needs stated in its STTR topic list, and then strike up a cooperative relationship with that institution to complete the R&D and convert that technology into product or service for NASA use (and perhaps other uses). This would appear to rule out something that other STTR agencies allow in which a small company with its own technology or idea seeks out a university or FFRDC that brings supplemental knowledge, expertise, and/or experience beneficial to completing the company’s R&D so that it can be commercialized.

Of course, the world is seldom black and white, so you might ask about a situation in which the small business has part of the solution/capability and the university/FFRDC has the other—would this qualify as an STTR for NASA? Our argument would be yes, provided that you can make a convincing case within the STTR proposal that the core of the project is the university/FFRDC technology. In such a situation, we would encourage the proposing small business to focus on the university /FFRDC part as the basic technology that is to be transferred, and then indicate how the knowledge/IP/etc of the small business can leverage the university/FFRDC technology to create a viable solution to NASA’s needs and a commercialization opportunity.

This brings us to one final, important point: all too often we see an STTR proposal in which ALL of the technology and know how is in the university/FFRDC and therefore the small business is not part of the R&D but is only there to "manage" the project, write reports, buy supplies and commercialize the outcome. This is not a valid STTR project. An STTR requires that the R&D be a collaborative effort between the small business and the university/FFRDC, and therefore the proposal must convince the reviewer that the small business has a legitimate role in the research and be qualified for that role. That’s why the small firm is required to perform at least 40% of an STTR research project.