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PSI is pleased to lend its voice to a coalition of leading tech companies who have concerns that pending legislation in the U.S. Senate to reform the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) programs would erode the federal government’s ability to meet its unique technology needs and make it easier for China and other adversaries to steal sensitive U.S. technology.
The New England Innovation Alliance, a coalition of two dozen small high-tech companies, has submitted a statement for the record to the Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship arguing that the proposed INNOVATE Act would severely undermine the research goals of “mission agencies” like the Department of Defense with unique technology needs.
The provisions include capping awards for proven innovators who regularly partner with leading research universities and requiring SBIR recipients to achieve large-scale commercialization – even though the military and law enforcement often have requirements that lack widespread commercial applications. At the same time, the legislation calls for providing up to $30 million awards to venture-funded defense startups by substantially reducing research institution funding to universities under the STTR program.
“NEIA members are not typically single-technology companies on a linear venture-capital driven trajectory,” the alliance stated. “They focus on innovating technologies that federal agencies, like the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and its service branches, need to meet critical mission objectives, for which no other stakeholders are positioned to deliver.”
Failing to recognize the SBIR-derived technologies that are regularly sold to other government contractors and integrated into more complicated systems and weapons platforms “devalues an important role played by small businesses” in the SBIR/STTR programs, they said.
“SBIR topics are also not exclusively about heroic entrepreneurs building a large new spacecraft, aircraft, or ship,” the alliance added. “They are much more often about creating significant innovative improvements to component capabilities that maintain the technological dominance of those platforms or reducing the cost of sustaining those platforms.”