Gail & Jim Greenwood, Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

Copyright © 2000 by Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

Within the past few days, the Department of Defense has prereleased its topics for its second FY2000 Small Business Innovation Research solicitation. With DOD being the largest single agency participating in SBIR, it is important that you consider them when looking for an agency to propose to (please note that not all DOD components are participating this time—notably the Air Force and BMDO are not). With about 50% of the total SBIR budget of all 10 participating agencies, DOD has topics that range from training to health care to environment (and some defense ones, too).

Note that we said that DOD has "prereleased" its topics. This is an important distinction from when they formally "release" them in their solicitation on July 1^st. The distinction is that you now are allowed to speak with the topic authors, whereas when the solicitation is released you cannot. Until the solicitation is formally released, by the way, you will have to access the topic descriptions and authors from the DOD SBIR website (www.acq.osd.mil/sadbu/sbir/solicit.html) or the Navy SBIR website (www.navysbir.brtrc.com/dodsbir002.htm).

Why, you ask, would you want to talk with the topic authors? There are many reasons, but the primary one is because you will not know all that you would like to know from the brief topic description that you are given on the website. A lot of thought and activity has already been invested by DOD in a particular topic before it shows up in the SBIR program, and all of that prior effort gets condensed into a paragraph or two. Your job, during the prerelease period, is to gather some of that prior work so that you can write a more focused and responsive proposal—you know, the type of proposal that gets funded!

You can speak with a DOD topic author through one or more of three mechanisms. All have pros and cons. One is the telephone, another is email, and the third is in person. Telephone is relatively cheap, and has a distinct advantage over email in that you can "read between the lines" of what the topic author is saying, how they are saying it, and what they are not saying. Email has the advantage of allowing you to carefully think through your questions in advance and may be an easier way to reach the author if they are very busy, but it has the disadvantage of giving you only the factual response without the all important emotional response (or body language, if it’s possible to have body language communicated by phone!) to your questions. Some feel it is best to go visit the topic author during the prerelease period to gain the most information and show your high level of interest/commitment to this topic, while others point to the higher cost of this approach (although a $500 plane ticket might be cheap insurance for a $100k opportunity) and the longer intrusion that it puts on the author’s time. We recommend starting with a phone call, then resorting to email if you can’t reach the author, and then include a site visit if the conversation is good and the author seems interested in your approach to his or her problem. Or, you might send an email as an introduction, and ask if the topic author can respond with an email indicating when you might call him or her to ask for more information; again, you would decide whether a site visit is appropriate based on how well the two of you gel during the phone/email correspondence.

Regardless of how you contact the topic author, have a list of questions prepared ahead of time. While the list will depend on your specific issues, knowledge of this particular need of the DOD, and what you feel will give you a competitive edge, here are some typical issues you might address:

Ask the topic author to "set the stage" in terms of when the problem occurs—under what conditions, during what time period, etc.

Ask him or her what their component has tried in the past to solve the problem, and what was wrong with those solutions

Ask him or her where you might get additional information—either a document or a person

Confirm that this is his or her topic—DOD personnel get reassigned frequently, so sometimes the author has "inherited" this topic from his or her predecessor. If this is the case, try to determine whether he or she really thinks this is an important topic that must be addressed.

As a related topic, ask who would be the end user—some DOD components have a separate entity managing their SBIR topics versus the entity that actually will deploy the resulting innovation.

Ask whether funding exists this fiscal year for this topic—government budgets change, so there may be topics listed that do not have funding.

Ask who will be involved in the review of the proposals—the topic author likely will not want to share names, but he or she might at least tell you something about their backgrounds.

Without giving away the farm, describe briefly what your approach is, and solicit the topic author’s feedback on it. This is probably best done after you know more about what the author is thinking, what solutions have been tried, and what biases the evaluators may have toward certain approaches.

If at all possible, take advantage of this prerelease period for the DOD topics to learn more about the topic author’s needs, preferences, and view on the world. Whether you do it by phone, email or in person and whether you spend 10 minutes or two days doing it, you will be amazed how much you will learn and how it will help you prepare your Phase I proposal to DOD.

PS—don’t forget about Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) which can provide information packets on any DOD SBIR topic. Check out http://dticam.dtic.mil/sbir.