Senate SBIR Language Offers $10 Million to States

SSTI has learned the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) reauthorization language the Senate Small Business Committee (SBC) will be marking up on Tuesday, March 21 is substantially different than HR 2392, passed by the House last fall. While HR 2392 basically makes housekeeping revisions to the $1.1 billion SBIR program, the SBC version includes several components addressing issues a majority of states identified as problems for their own SBIR outreach and assistance efforts. SSTI understands the proposed Senate language has support from key Committee members from both political parties.

For the past ten months, the Federal Technology Business Investment Committee of the Science and Technology Council of the States (STCS) has been developing recommendations to improve state-federal partnership on SBIR. Most of the recommendations of the STCS committee are addressed favorably in the SBC version of the SBIR Reauthorization bill including:

Funding for State SBIR Assistance
The SBC language authorizes creation of the Federal and State Technology Partnership Program (FAST), a $10 million initiative to provide matching funds for state efforts in SBIR outreach and technical assistance. FAST would be administered and managed jointly by the Small Business Administration (SBA), the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense. The program would be open to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico; however, funding would be awarded competitively based on demonstrated need for the services proposed, reasonableness of costs, how well the proposed activities are integrated into the state’s existing programs to support small high-technology firms, and the manner in which the state will measure the results or effectiveness of the proposed activities.

In the FAST Program, states would have great flexibility to determine the best approach to take to assist their technology-based businesses. Each state would have to demonstrate why the approach — be it proposal review, Phase 0 grants, bridge grants, mentoring networks, commercialization funding, etc. — was selected for their business community. All approaches must lead toward the commercialization of SBIR technologies.

The FAST Program would include a three-stage match requirement based on a state’s overall performance in the SBIR program. The states which receive the fewest SBIR awards would only need to provide 50 cents match for each dollar of FAST funding, while the states with the most SBIR awards would need to provide 1:1 match. Intermediate states would match 75 cents for each FAST dollar received.

To insure integration with each state’s existing portfolio of technology-based economic development programs, the FAST program would only accept one proposal from each state each year. The Senate language requires the SBA Administrator to work in cooperation with the federal SBIR agencies, technology-based businesses, state science and technology councils, state EPSCoR committees, and state and local development agencies.

FAST awards would be for up to three years, allowing states more security and confidence in securing appropriate expertise and staff. The multi-year award term also allows more adequate time to measure each program’s impact. FAST would be authorized from FY 2001 through 2005.