[azhenley]

SBIR grants require a lot of expertise about the arcane application process.

There’s an entire service industry around helping businesses apply. The companies that I’ve seen be successful at it hired several people with SBIR experience specifically to handle the grant proposals.

I had 3 successful NSF proposals and could not have done it without an experienced team helping me just with the legalese and process.

[dls2016]

My buddy and I did it last year. I wouldn't say you need a whole team. We picked an area and spent a two years honing an idea. He is a retired Air Force officer and had some contracting experience from the other side. I have a PhD in an unrelated field (math), a handful of papers and one unsuccessful NSF attempt. He learned all the application rules and took care of 100% of that stuff. I formulated the technical proposal and work plan, wrote the budget and the bulk of the technical writing.

My partner reached out to a few small business development centers but, while they were very eager to help, we ultimately received only very minor feedback and a general thumbs up. I'd say in the two years it took us to hone a winning technical proposal, my partner was able to become somewhat of an expert in the rules. During that time we also applied for a non-SBIR government grant, unsuccessfully, where we lost a lot of points for being a 2-man team. If you're willing to put in the time, it's very doable to write an application which follows the rules.

In fact, I'd say one thing we ran into was finding ourselves "inventing" rules because we were overly cautious with our compliance to what we thought were the rules. The application truly is the most difficult part of compliance for a SBIR Phase I.

The problems with our Phase I were purely technical. We weren't able to advance the state-of-the-art enough to be able to write a convincing commercialization plan. And I don't think there was any consulting firm we could have hired to fix that problem.