As the August 5 deadline approaches for the submission of SBIR/STTR grants, many of you may be still working long nights on your application.  By the way, this deadline stands under the assumption that a continuing resolution (CR) is passed to fund the program beyond July 31 (see http://www.zyn.com/sbir/ for details). We have our fingers crossed here.

Having assisted several investigators in writing and editing SBIR/STTR grant applications (and currently writing one myself), I know how involved the process can be, especially for first-timers. I highly recommend educating yourself by going to an SBIR conference (this year’s is in Oklahoma City, http://www.sbirok.org/), attending an information session or workshop (offered by numerous universities and incubators), or listening to online seminars, such as those offered at http://center.ncet2.org/.

For those who are new to the process or maybe just considering it, I have compiled a list of tips:

1. Start early. This is an obvious one, but a tip that cannot be emphasized enough. Simply obtaining all the logins required to actually submit the grant can take up to a month, at a minimum. Writing the grant could take up to 100 hours.
2. Contact the program director from the agency of interest. Send a letter of intent (in the form of an email) to the director of the solicitation or agency of interest about two months prior to the deadline. Include a summary abstract of your idea and follow it up with a phone call to get their feedback on how appropriate it is to the goals of the agency.
3. File a provisional patent prior to submission. This protects your idea against competitors. Additionally, abstracts of funded proposals are made public, which means you will not be able patent your idea at that point.
4. Get feedback on your application. Ask several independent researchers for comments and fully address each one.
5. Allow a week for the submission process. Really.

Recent changes in the process have resulted in shortened page limits for the application, and increased award amounts, making it even more appealing to try to get a piece of the $2B pie.

Good luck to everyone and let us know if we can help!

Tags: grant writing, SBIR grants, scientific writing, STTR grants

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 9:56 PM and is filed under Grant Writing, SBIR grants, Scientific Writing, STTR grants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.