U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst introduced legislation this week that makes changes to the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.
The SBIR-STTR programs allocate a portion of federal agencies’ research and development budgets to small businesses to accelerate their development of critical technologies.
Ernst’s bill, the Investing in National Next-Generation Opportunities for Venture Acceleration and Technological Excellence (INNOVATE) Act, would reauthorize the SBIR STTR programs, with several key changes.
Among them, the INNOVATE Act would:
- Eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) preferences in the award process and require businesses with dozens of awards to be commercially viable and not exclusively rely on SBIR awards as a source of perpetual revenue.
- Reserve 2.5 percent of the SBIR allocation for smaller, one-time $40,000 awards to new applicants with a shorter, streamlined application focused on the commercialization potential of their innovation.
- Empower the Department of Defense (DoD) to scale the most-promising technologies to long-term contracts by using existing funds to establish targeted, larger-dollar awards.
- Define foreign risk to provide a consistent baseline for agencies’ evaluation of potential awardees, implementing a clear list of ties to foreign countries of concern that deem a small business ineligible for awards, and strengthening federal agencies’ ability to claw back award dollars if a small business exposes SBIR-STTR-funded intellectual property to adversarial influence.
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Eliminate underperforming pilot programs and restrict the number of award proposals that a single company can offer annually.
“With its authorization expiring at the end of this fiscal year, today we turn our attention to the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Programs, or SBIR-STTR. This program has effectively partnered federal agencies with private sector entrepreneurs to scale research and development projects aimed at addressing the pressing challenges of the day,” Ernst said, speaking at a recent Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship hearing.
Ernst serves as the chair of that committee.
“I am excited to announce that today I am introducing the ‘Investing in National Next-Generation Opportunities for Venture Acceleration and Technological Excellence’ or ‘INNOVATE’ Act, a bill to reauthorize and comprehensively reform the SBIR-STTR program,” Ernst added. “My legislation streamlines and simplifies existing processes, directs the funding toward projects based on merit, channels funding to help accelerate the most promising projects towards final stage commercialization, protects against waste and abuse, and introduces enhanced protections and accountability tools to prevent these new technologies from getting into the hands of our foreign adversaries.”