| 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 |
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.