Federal agencies fail, on average, 24 percent of the time to notify applicant small businesses of award decisions within required deadlines. A small business has a zero percent chance of being able to plan to start an innovation project within six months if they apply to ARPA-E (the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) or the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, both of which never met the deadline.
The U.S. Small Business Administration and Department of Treasury have released strategic plans through FY 2022.
The U.S. Small Business Administration and Department of Treasury have released strategic plans through FY 2022. Similar to the new Department of Commerce plan, these documents do not mention programs and offices that the administration has marked for elimination, creating a lack of clear strategic direction for millions of dollars in entrepreneurship and innovation funding that Congress continues to appropriate and direct. Specific areas of concern at these agencies are the SBA’s Regional Innovation Clusters and Growth Accelerator programs and the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.
In the February 3 Federal Digest, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) issued proposed rules affecting Impact Small Business Investment Corporations (SBICs) and is accepting comments. In addition to codifying the existing, temporary guidelines, the proposal would add new investment certifications, change the expedited processing benefit for reduced fees and replace the branding penalty for non-compliant SBICs with the threat of imposed default.
The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) announced today the addition of three more cluster organizations to the portfolio of communities supported through the SBA Regional Innovation Clusters initiative, raising the total number of awardees in the program to 14.
The U.S. Small Business Administration has announced four new Regional Innovation Clusters that will be included among its portfolio of high-performing regional networks. Awardee clusters will receive $500,000-$550,000 for mentoring, counseling, pitch development and other small business support programs. The new members of SBA’s cluster portfolio include Milwaukee’s Water Technology Cluster, Southeastern New Mexico’s Autonomous and Unmanned Systems Cluster, a Retail, Supply Chain and Food Processing Cluster spanning the Ozarks region and a Marine Industries Cluster in several Gulf Coast states.
The administration’s FY15 budget request for the Small Business Administration (SBA) is $710 million. Of this amount, $47.5 million is for business loan subsidy and $197.8 million is for non-credit programs. Through the Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative the administration also proposes public-private investment funding to support the scaling-up of new advanced manufacturing firms into full-scale commercial production.