Last week I was in Washington DC attending a three-day NSF grantees workshop. When I first learned of this mandatory event last summer, I rolled my eyes at the prospect of enduring three days of boring presentations from government bureaucrats. In hindsight, I couldn’t have been more wrong!
In general, I’ve become very impressed with what NSF is doing with their Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Prior to receiving our grant, I thought all it entailed was getting some government money. While that is very important, the program goes much further. NSF views a core objective of their SBIR program as helping to build successful companies. They have included, with our grant, a variety of resources beyond to help us do that.
To start, they run all their Phase I grantees through a two-month “boot camp” focused on customer discover and business model definition. This is basically a “light” version of Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad approach to startups that has been adopted by NSF and other government agencies, and taught by many startup incubators and academic institutions. At last week’s workshop all the NSF grantees presented their work and received feedback from experienced, private-sector panelists.
In addition, we’ve been assigned an NSF Program Director with substantial private industry experience and is knowledgeable in our technology area. Right at the program start he told us that his primary goal is to help us win an NSF Phase II grant (up to $750K). We have had multiple discussions with him about our plans and have received valuable advice about creating the best possible Phase II proposal.
NSF has also contracted with third-party companies to provide entrepreneurship training and commercialization assistance to grantees. Our assigned company, Larta Institute, has in turn assigned us an experienced mentor who is helping us develop our NSF Phase II commercialization plan. (In NSF Phase II proposals, applicants’ commercialization plans take on a much greater level of importance than in Phase I proposals.) Larta also provides grantees access to a network of industry contacts for exploring potential partnerships.
All these services are provided to us free of charge as part of our grant. Overall, I found the general attitude and passion of all the NSF personnel last week to be very positive and impressive—not at all what my perceptions have been about federal government employees! I have found our NSF involvement to be a very positive one for Uniqarta and I encourage all startups out there to consider NSF’s SBIR program.