The supposedly last national SBIR conference (Small Business Innovation and Research) is happening in Milwaukee WI, November 6-9. The conference will be attended by U.S. federal agencies which engage in extramural research, that is, they pay people outside the agency to develop products and services which can later be bought by the public and the federal government. If you are a small business, you can get a piece of the action, SBIR grants, which in Phase I are typically around $100,000, and in Phase II $750,000. All the biggies are there, NASA, the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, Department Homeland Security. The US Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency are also included. Why is this of interest to non-profits? Non-profits often partner with for-profit companies. In our telehealth project, for instance, the majority of the money, (more than half) is going toward the non-profit side of the arrangement.
tfnp 