SBIR Proposal Writing Basics: How Many Strikes Before You’re Out at NIH?

Gail & Jim Greenwood, Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 by Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

If you’ve been in the SBIR/STTR programs a while, you probably remember the good old days when National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave you 3 strikes before you were out. In other words, if you were sending in a Phase 1 or 2 grant proposal to NIH, you could submit the original and, if it was not awarded, resubmit it. Then you got a third chance because you could resubmit it once more if the original resubmission wasn’t successful. 

More recently, NIH adopted a “2 strikes and you’re out” policy. That meant you could submit an original Phase 1 or 2 grant proposal to NIH and, if it wasn’t awarded, you had only one resubmission opportunity.

Well, welcome to the world of the constantly changing SBIR/STTR programs. NIH has recently announced changes to the resubmission rules on its grant programs, including SBIR and STTR. That policy states that you can submit an original proposal and, if it is not awarded, you can send in a resubmittal. As before, that resubmittal must be accompanied by a 1 page introduction in which you explain how you have atoned for your sins, and modified the proposal from its original submission based on the sage advice and feedback from the NIH reviewers who critiqued the original proposal.

So here’s where the change has occurred: you submit an initial Phase 1 NIH SBIR/STTR grant proposal, it gets rejected, and you resubmit. If the resubmittal isn’t funded, then you may now submit a “new” proposal around the same research and application. If that “new” proposal isn’t funded, then you could resubmit it. You can repeat this process until, apparently, you get tired of doing so.

Four things to note about this new NIH policy:

First, remember that an NIH resubmission must be accompanied by that one page “introduction” that we mentioned above. This will only be done on every other submission of your proposal, since the alternating submissions are “new” proposals and therefore no one page introduction is permitted.

Second, this change only applies to Phase 1 NIH grants. Therefore, Phase 2 submissions are still governed by the same “2 strikes and you’re out” rule. And what about an NIH FastTrack proposal consisting of a combined Phase 1 and 2 proposal? It is treated like a Phase 1 proposal, so you can submit, resubmit, submit, resubmit…

Third, this policy only applies to NIH grants, not to NIH contracts. Most of you are submitting SBIR/STTR proposals to NIH’s grant programs, but they do have a small contract program for which they issue a solicitation in the summertime.

Finally, regardless of whether you are on the “resubmit” or “new submission” side of this cycle, you should always be learning from the Summary Statement received on the last version of the proposal. That statement can teach you things to avoid next time you submit, in terms of errors in what you have proposed as well as reviewers’ preferences. Combine this with a conversation with the NIH staffer who participated in the review panel to gain his or her take on the most important issues that you should address on your next iteration of the proposal.