And They’re Off!
38 SBIRs and 8 STTRs. With a huge range of topics from Navy, Air Force, CBD, DHA, DTRA, and MDA, there is something for everybody in the Pre-release of DoD SBIR 24.3 and STTR 24.C
Did you know Novichok was back?
Note: SBIR CBD243-004 was taken down by DSIP on 9/11/2024
As I mentioned last week, the real challenge is knowing what topics to go after, (or more importantly, what not to). If you don’t believe me, here is a great article from 2017 that tells a compelling story about how choosing the wrong opportunities can cause real problems for your business.
Most businesses look at this list and know that well over half of the topics couldn’t possibly apply to them. Maybe one or two are right down your alley and there is no second guessing. Maybe.
There will be about 30 companies that try and propose against “AI/ML Data Extraction from Scientific Documents,” because it’s 2024 and everyone thinks “only they” have cracked the code to homebrew AI/ML. That will be a very crowded topic. The going statistic for Phase I proposal award rates is about 15% (Google can tell you that). Our study shows there were 3642 Phase 1 SBIR/STTRs in 2023. Which means, there were about 24,000 submissions.
You could dive into the middle of a topic that everyone will go after, or you could look at the hard problems—the edge topics that you think YOU could really have a shot at solving, but you are still early in idea development.
Remember, unless your business plans to live on SBIRs forever, you need to make sure that you actually want to grow in the direction of your proposal, otherwise it will just be a distraction.
Once you identify a few topics of interest, you need more data so you don’t waste your time. SBIR Phase I’s are not money makers, as you probably know. At 7% fee, you are “profiting” a few thousand bucks that probably don’t cover your time spent preparing the proposal even with indirect costs included in your proposal, (if you win).
1. First and foremost, read the solicitation and submit questions (keeping in mind that everyone else will see your questions too).
2. You can go on SBIR.gov and start researching the topics you think might be a good fit to see what companies have won SBIRs in that field before and what types of solutions they developed.
3. You can request access to the SBIR Research Portal and get all of the past award data, pre-processed for you.
Here for example is a look at how you can quickly understand previous efforts related to CBD243-004:
By using the keyword "decontamination" I can quickly scan all of the awarded Abstracts and see what agencies have awarded things in this field before. Next, I can take a look by Year and see what words are appearing more, and which ones may have faded out. This is a great way to get an initial read on the trends within the SBIR program. You can easily repeat this with a few other keywords (or use the keyword Word Cloud to expand your search).