Advocates for small businesses and the U.S. research community are once again at loggerheads over pending legislation to expand a multibillion-dollar federal program that promotes commercialization of academic research. It’s shaping up as another long, hard fight: Science lobbyists are playing catch-up but have time on their side, while small business leaders say they don’t understand why more academics aren’t in their corner.
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, begun in 1982, is funded by taxing the research budgets of 11 federal agencies. This year, for example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will spend almost $900 million of its $32 billion budget on SBIR and a smaller, related program called Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR).
The money is awarded competitively to small business owners, many with university ties, to fine-tune technology so that it can be commercialized. Legislation moving through both houses of Congress would raise the current 3% SBIR set-aside significantly over the next several years—to 6% by 2028 in the Senate version (S. 2812), and to 4.5% by 2022 in the bill before the House of Representatives (H.R. 4783). STTR, now at 0.45%, would grow by 2022 to 0.6% in the House bill and 1% in the Senate bill.
Although both sides agree that more academic research needs to be turned into products and services, science lobbyists oppose growing the SBIR program at the expense of funding fundamental science. “We recognize that the SBIR and STTR programs are an important component of the innovation pipeline,” 77 professional societies and academic organizations wrote in a 13 May letter to key legislators. “However, a mandatory increase in the SBIR/STTR allocation as proposed … will result in fewer research opportunities for investigators.” It also comes at the wrong time, they write: “The proposed increases … would be implemented when future funding levels for the federal science agencies are very uncertain.”
Advocates for the increases say the country needs to do more to commercialize federally funded research, and that SBIR has proven its effectiveness. “Increasing the ability of small businesses to compete for R&D awards is a good use of taxpayer dollars, says Haley Dorgan, a spokesperson for Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D–NH), who sponsored the bill that the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship approved last week. (The House bill was approved by the House Small Business Committee on 23 March.) “Despite representing a sliver of the research and development budget,” Dorgan says, “studies have found that the SBIR/STTR program punches well above its weight.”
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