During my MBA program, I investigated government programs for granting money to small business programs to conduct and productize technology research. There are two programs (SBIR and STTR) in which eleven different government agencies provide two billion dollars in grants to small technology companies.

I actually wrote a preliminary proposal, which was modeled on a copy of a successful proposal provided to me from one of my classmates, Holly. The proposal was sent for developing feedback-controlled sports bra for SmartWear, Inc. While she was not the “principal investigator,” she wrote the proposal, which led to a National Institute of Health grant in 2001 of $100,000 for six months to a year of work.

I never sent in my proposal, since, at the time, I missed the proposal deadline which was infrequent (once a year) and estimated my chances of success at being low, since it involved natural language. The large companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft) have hundreds of researchers, developers, and linguists, compile massive amounts of data and pour millions of dollars into research. With me, my credentials and my product ideas are in doubt; I am not going to convince anyone reading my proposal that I have a better way especially with a $100K grant.

The couple, who developed the Dragon Software speech-recognition technology, subsisted for seven years during the 1980s through government grants, before they were able to release version 1.0 of their software.

I have been thinking that my static analysis tool could actually fare better. I have working technology right now as well as demonstrated commitment using my own time and funds. My background (schooling and prior work experience) is very good. There is still quite a bit of work that I need to do to take it to the next level.

The government agencies examine proposals more frequently, four times a month, with DoD solicitations arriving in Nov 1 and the next proposal deadline in January. However, proposal writing and benchmarks are a time sink, and I could probably just do better organically by keeping focus on my development and funding my research through internal cash flows. I do wish that I had submitted a proposal last year.