If You Build It, Will Anyone Care?
Welcome back to the Innovator's Labyrinth, where I offer actionable nondilutive-funding info and insights to the startup and small business community. In each edition, I share current funding opportunities, lessons learned from my experience as a grant writer and commercialization strategist, services available from Labyrinth Consulting, and other resources for founders. I look forward to helping you find your way!
Featured Opportunity
DARPA's ERIS acts as a low-barrier entry point for new defense-related technological solutions.
See the contract opportunity on SAM.gov for more details.
Lessons Learned
Collecting documents from partners will take longer than you think.
Grant funding applications require documentation for different kinds of partnerships and collaborations: subawards, Institutional Review Board approvals, letters of support, and so on. After you complete your company registrations, one of your first steps in starting a new application should be to reach out to the people and organizations with whom you'd like to work. Ideally, you've already established relationships with potential partners, who will then be primed to help you with research, testing, clinical studies, commercialization, and other crucial components of your approach. Either way, coordinating individuals and bureaucracies, working out the details, and completing the documents will take time—and probably longer than you think. Start as early as you can so you won't have to submit at the very last minute because you're waiting on paperwork.
"Build It and They Will Come" Is Not a Commercialization Strategy
It's never too early to think about commercialization.
Although the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR/STTR) program is known for supporting innovative research and development (R&D) across industries, commercialization is also a fundamental part of the program, starting in Phase I. In fact, the Department of Energy SBIR/STTR Phase I application requires a four-page commercialization plan. But program officials across agencies emphasize the importance of conducting commercialization research—particularly customer discovery—alongside traditional R&D. The messages from program officials include
National Institutes of Health: principal investigators (PIs) don't understand who their customers are and need to do discovery
Department of Defense: the agency provides the demand signal, but PIs still need to find users and understand who to market to (i.e., the user isn't necessarily the buyer)
National Science Foundation: the most common reason for company failure is building something that no one wants
The NSF in particular seeks to catalyze company growth: 62% of their Phase I recipients are new to the NSF, 94% have less than ten employees, and 80% were created in the last five years. They define an inadequate commercialization plan as one that only includes Internet research rather than information acquired through customer discovery—which is really just talking to people in your industry.
The point is that you have to teach and sell, both your reviewers and your future customers. Building a commercialization strategy begins the day you found your company, and a good one starts with finding those customers and finding out what they really want.
Service Highlight
Do you need help utilizing your SBIR/STTR Technical and Business Assistance (TABA) funds? These funds can pay for market research and business development: customer discovery, business modeling, path to market, and more. I can help you get started!
Resources
Join me at noon on Tuesday, September 23, at the UNM Rainforest Building for my seminar "Strategizing and Writing Your Best Proposal for the SBIR/STTR Grant."
I'll provide an overview of the SBIR/STTR program, along with best practices and strategies for crafting your proposal. You'll learn exactly what you need to do to get started, how to plan your grant-writing process, and how to approach the writing of your application. You'll also receive a template to help you start outlining your proposal package. If you're interested in nondilutive funding but not sure where to start, this seminar will help you find your way.
Let's Talk!
If you set up a meeting with the CEO of a company and instead of showing up they send their assistant, what would you think? I recently heard an SBIR/STTR program official use this analogy to describe what it's like to receive an AI-generated proposal. Distinguish your proposal by working with a professional who will help you strategize your approach, craft your narrative, and navigate the application process. Schedule a free consultation to discuss your funding strategy.