[el_chapitan]

The system is flawed.

However, the system also does some very good work by forcing more work into smaller companies. I have had the pleasure of working for two companies doing business with the government. One doing research through the SBIR program, and another just winning contracts as a small business.

On the good side, both of these companies did very good work and didn't do the "IP shuffle" as you described above. In fact, I'd say the biggest impediment to us getting stuff done was either the government moving slow, or some other company we were forced to work with slowing us down. In fact, the kiss of productivity death for any project was getting involved in a project with one of the bigger consulting companies (BAH, Accenture, etc).

On the other side, the title of "woman owned" and "minority owned" are completely taken advantage of at all times. Both companies I worked for were "woman owned", which in practice meant that the wives of the bosses owned the company (or at least some of it), but really didn't take part in anything other than showing up for Christmas parties. I am not aware, however, of any real advantage the "woman owned" and "minority owned" titles got us, though.

[bostonOU]

In all my experience, the SBIR program was one of the biggest scams around. At the end of project, you only have to produce "proof that you researched" the problem. It's completely ok for you to spend all the money to simply determine that the project is not feasible (i.e. we watched movies all day and did a few google searches during the previews).

In theory, the government would stop giving projects to companies that never produced anything. I personally never saw that happen.

If a company is really on the up and up, the SBIR program could be a great opportunity. However, it's way too easy to game the system.

[Nate75Sanders]

Mostly true.

Phase I requirements are typically (but not always) that you have to produce a report that you did feasibility research on the problem. Sometimes a working prototype is the Phase I deliverable. Usually Phase II is where the working prototype is and Phase III is a delivered working system (though for larger projects, Phase III is just the prototype or improvements to Phase II's prototype).

Typical payouts for the phases:

Phase I - 75-100K

Phase II - 750K

Phase III - 2 mil

Most of these projects are challenging enough that for 75K, you're not going to be able to deliver much more than a report. Once you factor in overhead, that's about 4-6 man-months.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, though, that it is greatly taken advantage of -- on a very large scale, and the relationship between companies and granting Program Managers is a big, big deal.

There are definitely companies that play the "we'll do nearly anything" open-ended engineering game and pay themselves using Phase I's.

I have seem some legitimately great work come out of NSF SBIRs, which are similar, but quite a different game in many ways from military SBIRs.

I worked for a company writing military SBIRs for 10 months. Worst job of my life, probably. It was also mind-blowing how OK with all of this that most people of all levels of that chain were.

EDIT: formatting, minor content

[bostonOU]

What you're saying is true.

In a Phase II, the deliverable is normally a prototype. But since it is by definition research, it's expected that some of these projects come against problems that are not reasonably solvable. Therefore, you can fail on your deliverable and have that be completely ok.