GAO finds new Air Force SBIR process increases participation and geographic distribution of awards

A new open topic approach used by the U.S. Air Force in issuing Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) awards coincided with an overall increase in the agency’s SBIR/STTR participation figures and proposal processing times, according to a recent federal analysis. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that using open topics for soliciting Phase I proposals, which the Air Force implemented in 2018, has largely displaced the agency’s conventional process of offering very specific research topics. The open approach was found to be more effective in attracting new companies to federal contracting and issuing awards quickly. GAO found nearly 43 percent of the 1,001 open topics awardees had no prior federal contract experience compared to only 14 percent of the 771 conventional awardees being new to federal procurement. Additionally, GAO reports that an April 2021 study found that after receiving an open topic award these awardees were more likely to obtain further funding from other sources.

 Accompanying the open topic approach was a move to halving the Phase I award research period to three months and reducing the size of the award to only $50,000. The result, GAO reports, was an eight-fold increase in the portfolio of Phase I awards made in just three years: 575 awards in FY 2018 to more than 4,700 in FY 2020. The distribution of awards geographically also was much more disperse, one of the goals Congress and SBA would like to see in all 11 participating agencies’ SBIR programs.

However, participation in the program by disadvantaged businesses remains difficult to discern. GAO noted that the Air Force’s own impact study on the changes did not assess the reliability of its data on disadvantaged businesses nor did the Air Force’s impact report include information on participation by women-owned small businesses. Since publication of that 2021 impact report, GAO points out the DOD has made it a requirement for companies to indicate whether they are a women or minority owned business.