Gail & Jim Greenwood, Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

Copyright © 2003 by Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

As many of you know, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been expected to become the 11^th agency to join the SBIR program. Based on a briefing from the National SBIR Conference last spring, this was expected to happen in FY05, which doesn’t start until October 2004. But surprise, surprise, DHS announced recently that they were going to join SBIR sooner, and then released its first ever SBIR solicitation last week. The solicitation is at http://www.eps.gov/spg/DHS-DR/OCPO/DHS-OCPO/HSSCHQ-04-R-00103/listing.html (rumor has it you win an award if you type the full address correctly the first time!).

This solicitation includes eight topics, which we are sure Richard Fowler has included elsewhere in this issue of the SBIR Alerting Service. Thanks to information from Maurice Swinton at SBA, we understand this solicitation will lead to about 60 Phase 1 awards of up to $100k each. Maurice also indicates that DHS is expected to have a second FY04 SBIR solicitation starting around April 2004. The solicitations are being released under the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA), a branch of DHS through which it will run its SBIR program.

The purpose of this article is to give you some of our impressions of the new DHS SBIR solicitation and program, and in turn some thoughts about what it means for those of you who may want to submit proposals.

First, the HSARPA solicitation has very much of a Dept of Defense "feel" to it. Awards will be made as contracts (vs. grants), meaning proposals should only be submitted if they clearly meet the needs expressed in the solicitation topics. The organization of each topic description also mimics what DOD does: the reader is told what Phase 1 should include, what Phase 2 will look like, and what HSARPA deems Phase 3 commercialization opportunities to include. Heck, even the name of this agency (HSARPA) echoes DoD’s agency known as DARPA, or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The message to the proposer is that you had better hit one of the eight solicitation topics on the head or not bother to submit—HSARPA even states that these "are the only topics for which proposals will be accepted at this time." A second message is that you should write your HSARPA proposal like you would write a contract proposal to someone like DOD, not like a grant proposal to NSF or NIH.

Second, HSARPA has not provided any names of topic authors or others to whom questions about specific solicitation topics can be addressed. The solicitation indicates that "All questions about this solicitation…" should be sent to their SBIR help desk (again, looking much like DOD) at the website or 1-800 number indicated. This "blackout period" on asking questions when a solicitation is active is not unusual for an agency that makes its SBIR awards as contracts, although DOD deserves considerable kudos for allowing questions to be asked during a "presolicitation" period. However, it can make preparing your proposal a bit tough, since you have to respond to the first ever SBIR solicitation of a brand new Federal agency on topics (homeland security) that represent a new area of interest/concern. We think you have several options here. One is to glean as much as you can from the solicitation topic descriptions, including the referenced articles and other publications listed for some topics, and do the best you can in terms of meeting what you think they are looking for. Another is to go through the Help Desk to see how helpful they can be with your topic-specific questions (one way to increase the chance of getting help is to offer for the answers to be posted for all competitors to see on the website—a poor second choice to getting the answer only for yourself, so don’t offer unless it looks like maybe the only way to get the answer). Yet another is to speak with any current or past contacts you have at HSARPA, DHS, or within the homeland defense community to see what you can learn about the topic itself or related subjects. Finally, as something you can do only after the solicitation closes, you can ask the HSARPA SBIR manager to tell you who the topic author was so you can strike up a dialog with them; this may help you in future solicitations and proposals.

As a related point, one strategy when you don’t have all the specifics you’d like to have when writing a proposal is to offer the reviewer some options. Don’t be snooty about the lack of information, and do not submit multiple solutions (in multiple proposals) to the same problem unless an agency allows it. But if you have one solution to a problem and just aren’t sure about what the agency wants regarding a particular aspect of the solution, just write something like "it was unclear from the topic description whether the sensor in our innovation should be hardware or software based. If the preferred configuration is within the hardware, then we’ll do X whereas if it has to be within the software then we’ll do Y."

Third, this solicitation is only open for a brief period, with proposals due December 15, 2003, and they must be submitted electronically in PDF format via the HSARPA SBIR website. The lessons here are several. One is that you are going to have to hustle to get a credible proposal pulled together in this time frame; the reward for doing so is that some potential competitors probably will decide not to submit while others may not hear about the solicitation in time to respond. Another is that a brand new agency requesting electronically submitted proposals on a popular subject like homeland defense dictates that you not try to build and submit your proposal at the last minute—or even in the last few days. Many of you know the problems DOD has had in the past with 99.99% of SBIR proposers sending their proposals electronically in the 11^th hour. HSARPA’s requirement that proposals be submitted electronically, combined with the deadline being at 4pm EST on December 15^th, almost guarantees an electronic traffic jam, so do not wait until the last minute to submit and risk not getting your proposal through the pipeline by the deadline.

Fourth, there are a lot of proposal-relevant tidbits throughout the solicitation, which represent both opportunities and potential pitfalls. Travel is an allowed activity and expenses in Phase 1. The PI must work for the proposing company, and cannot work full time elsewhere during the contract period. Proposals cannot contain classified information, and proprietary information should be omitted from the proposal abstract and elsewhere marked according to the directions in Section 5.4 of the solicitation. Any foreign nationals on your team must be identified, including their country of origin, role, and level of involvement. Proposals should not exceed $100k including direct costs, indirect costs and profit, and should not be for a period of performance of more than 6 months.

Fifth, we can assume that, given DHS’s mission and the current and anticipated concerns about homeland security, this agency is looking for projects that can provide prompt solutions to pressing problems. In that sense, HSARPA’s SBIR program may be more like DOD’s SOCOM component, which provides technologies to Special Forces such as the Navy Seals. SOCOM wants solutions "yesterday," which means they like Phase 1 projects that can be done in less than 6 months and Phase 2 projects that will be finished and ready for Phase 3 production in less than 2 years. HSARPA may have some longer term visions for some of its topics, but we suggest you to assess whether a sense of urgency might surround the topic to which you are responding. If there is, then help the reviewer feel that you are capable of doing the work, that the chances of success are good, and that you can quickly deploy and/or commercialize the outcome.

Finally, we want to remind you that if you are interested in the areas of homeland security and anti- and counter-terrorism, DHS/HSARPA is only one of many agencies you should consider. DOD, NIH, NSF, USDA and other SBIR agencies have specific relevant topics, or have indicated that they welcome proposals in their general areas of technical interest that have a homeland security application to them.