SBIR Proposal Writing Basics: eHarmony, STTR Style
Gail
& Jim Greenwood,
Copyright © 2009 by
One
of the great challenges of the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program
is match making between sources of technology and small companies that are
capable of transferring and commercializing it.
We hear from small firms “How do I find universities and Federal Labs
that have technologies?” while the Federal Labs and universities ask us “How
do we find small companies that are interested in our technologies?”
This is not a new problem—technology transfer gurus have been
struggling with it for decades.
There
are several ways to find an STTR partner. We want to encourage you to consider a
new approach, which is an experiment using the topics in the current Dept of
Defense STTR solicitation (FY09.A to be exact).
Small companies, universities and Federal Labs are encouraged to log on
to www.zyn.com, click on the “SBIR
Gateway,” then select “Finding a Partner for DOD STTR.”
They can then check off any topics in the FY09.A solicitation on which
they would like to partner (recall, with STTR, that the award goes to a small
business that has teamed with a non-profit research institution like a
university or Federal Laboratory).
So
that gets into the system the areas of interest of small firms, universities and
Federal Labs. But how do
organizations then access the database to see if the topics they are interested
in match up with those checked off by others?
Simply click on the search button, highlight the DOD STTR topic they are
interested in, and displayed will be the name and contact information for all
small firms, universities, and Federal Laboratories who are seeking a partner on
that topic. Using the contact
information, the interested party can then determine if there is a good fit
between their interests and capabilities and those of organizations in the
database.
One
way to make this work a bit easier is to first search the DoD FY09.A topics to
see if any of them align with your interests, whether you are the small company,
or the university/Federal Laboratory. Go
to www.dodsbir.net/Topics/Default.asp,
enter your key words, and indicate what you want to search (in the current
discussion, it would be “STTR”). Trust
us, this is a lot easier than plowing through page-after-page of topic
descriptions in the solicitation.
If
you use ZYN’s Rick Shindell’s little experiment and it bears fruit, be sure
to let him know. Or if your
interests don’t align with DOD topics in the FY09.A STTR solicitation, but you
think what Rick and zyn.com have done is a good idea and should be repeated for
other agencies’ future solicitations, then shoot him an email at rick@zyn.com
and tell him so.
If
this experiment doesn’t work for
you, you might consider one or more of the alternative approaches to STTR
matchmaking: