Evaluation and Recommendations for Improvement of the Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program

"In fiscal year 2004, the Director of the Department of Defense Small Business Technology and Industrial Base Office (SBTIBO) requested that the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a division of the RAND Corporation, examine the Department of Defense's (DoD's) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The purpose of the research project was to provide DoD with insights into the current status of its SBIR program in terms of the department's transformational technology priorities, innovation, and the small business defense industrial base. Following that initial assessment, the project's objective became the recommendation of policy options for making the DoD SBIR program more responsive to the needs of the department. This documented briefing provides both a record of the research that was conducted in the second half of 2004 and the recommendations that resulted from it. The project consisted of four parts. First, the study team gained a broad understanding of the SBIR program. Next, the team evaluated the DoD SBIR program's success in terms of the current set of goals for the program as measured by the department's current set of SBIR metrics, as well as by additional RAND-developed metrics. Since the DoD SBIR program's goals reflect little of DoD's broader national security mission, the third part of the study developed a set of DoD-specific goals for its SBIR program that better reflect the national security mission of the department. This task also entailed suggesting a number of additional SBIR metrics to assess progress against the proposed goals. The study concludes with a number of policy options, which, if implemented, could make the DoD SBIR program more responsive to the department's broader defense mission."--Abstract The broad goal of the Department of Defense (DoD) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program is "to harness the innovative talents of our nation's small technology companies for U.S. military and economic strength." RAND researchers examined the DoD SBIR program to assess to what extent DoD is funding small businesses and to determine whether the program is indeed stimulating innovation both in the military and commercially. Overall, the researchers found that SBIR research topics align well with the department's priorities while remaining flexible enough to focus in areas that are more appropriate for small businesses. But the researchers discovered other trends during the course of the research that might be cause for concern for the future of the program. For example, the DoD SBIR program is managed in a manner that may be too lean. This finding reinforces the idea that the DoD SBIR program might be perceived more as a tax and burden to be borne by DoD than as an research and development resource to be leveraged. In light of their findings, the researchers recommend policy options for making the DoD SBIR program more responsive to the needs of the department and to the broader defense mission