Review of the SBIR and STTR Programs at the Department of Energy (2020) / Chapter Skim
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4 The Landscape of DOE SBIR/STTR Awardees
4 The Landscape of DOE SBIR/STTR Awardees
Pages 83-102
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From page 83... ...
A sizeable fraction of funding goes to small firms that receive multiple awards over time, although the number has declined since the programmatic change in 2012. The committee 1 While the committee used the Small Business Administration's "socially and economically disadvantaged" designation selected by firms when completing their SBIR/STTR applications, the committee finds this designation to be problematic and unhelpful and recommends the use of "underrepresented minority" in future data collection efforts.
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From page 84... ...
These states are also the location of DOE national labs and prominent FIGURE 4-1 Geographic distribution of firms that won awards from FY 2005 through FY 2017 and national labs. NOTE: Red dots indicate the locations of DOE national laboratories.
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From page 85... ...
The distribution of first-time award recipients also varies across states. Awardee firms in from the highest awardee states tend to be previous award winners, not new SBIR/STTR recipients.
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From page 86... ...
As discussed in Chapter 3, the share of total DOE SBIR/STTR awards granted to woman-owned firms has remained below 12 percent since FY 2005.4 Awards to underrepresented minority groups have dropped significantly over the same period, hovering near 5 percent since FY 2008. Numbers of awards to woman- or underrepresented minorityowned firms by region are very small, and there are no statistically significant differences in the location of awardee firms owned by women or underrepresented minorities and others.
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From page 87... ...
TABLE 4-1 DOE SBIR/STTR Awards to Woman-owned Firms by Program Office, FY 2005-2017 Awards to Total Number Woman-owned Firms Program Office of Awards Number Percentage Office of Basic Energy Sciences 1,056 39 3.69 Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable 721 38 5.27 Energy Office of High Energy Physics 583 17 2.92 Office of Biological and Environmental 445 32 7.19 Research Office of Fossil Energy 348 36 10.34 Office of Nuclear Physics 347 13 3.75 Office of Advanced Scientific Computing 330 23 6.97 Research Office of Fusion Energy Sciences 217 17 7.83 Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation 192 8 4.17 Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and 181 5 2.76 Technology Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy 85 11 12.94 Reliability Office of Environmental Management 28 0 0.00 Total 4,533 239 SOURCE: Committee calculations based on data obtained from the Small Business Administration. 5 Data limitations reduce the count of awards available for complete case analysis.
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From page 88... ...
The DOE national laboratories and technology centers are a system of 17 facilities and laboratories overseen by DOE for the purpose of advancing science and technology to fulfill the DOE mission; 16 of them are federally funded research and development centers administered, managed, operated, and staffed by private-sector organizations under management and operating contract with DOE. The National Energy Technology Laboratory, located in Pittsburgh, PA; Morgantown, WV; and Albany, OR; are
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From page 89... ...
These descriptive data show little statistically significant evidence that the SBIR/STTR firms cluster around the DOE national labs. One exception was the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, which is associated with a cluster of SBIR/STTRawarded firms.
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From page 90... ...
Looking at these distances helps identify possible barriers to collaborations associated with different types of eligible nonprofit R&D institutions and different types of firms. Prior research did not examine the partner selection preferences of woman-owned firms or firms owned by underrepresented minorities; hence, there is little available published research about the barriers that minority-owned and woman-owned SBIR/STTR awardee firms may encounter in selecting R&D partners.
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From page 91... ...
For STTR Phase II grants, the average partner distance for HUBZone-located firms of 361 miles is less than half of the average partner distance for minority-owned firms or woman-owned firms. As shown in Table 4-4, the average distance between an STTR Phase I awardee and its DOE national lab collaborator is 864 miles.
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From page 92... ...
Partner Type Nonprofit 60 6.3 50 107,543 708 152 10 687,537 414 1,659 University 618 65.2 443 120,790 615 196 175 841,375 698 1,205 National lab 270 28.5 185 112,572 864 130 85 791,640 1,007 786 Overall sample 948 100.0 678 117,571 690 170 270 821,499 785 1,047 Ownership Minority-owned 63 6.6 43 123,170 491 251 20 959,868 807 1,189 Not minority-owned 885 93.4 635 117,192 704 167 250 810,518 783 1,035 Woman-owned 64 6.8 46 131,439 813 162 18 814,129 909 896 Not woman-owned 884 93.2 632 116,562 681 171 252 822,022 776 1,059 HUBZone 44 4.6 28 139,718 442 316 16 922,775 361 2,557 Non-HUBZone 904 95.4 650 116,617 701 166 254 815,170 811 1,005 SOURCE: Committee calculations based on data obtained from the Small Business Administration.
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From page 93... ...
DOE provides a link on its SBIR/STTR website to the Lab Partnering Service, an online tool designed to link investors with experts and resources at DOE labs but which can also be valuable resource for SBIR/STTR applicants.9 The Lab Partnering Service tool may provide a template upon which to build a resource for helping firms identify research partners beyond the national labs. By making it easy for applicants to find and connect to eligible research partners, DOE may be able to substantially improve the breadth and depth of its applicant pool.
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From page 94... ...
A previous National Academies study found that, at least among TABLE 4-5 Definitions of Multiple Award Recipients ("Mills/MARs") in the Literature Study Definition GAO (1998)
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From page 95... ...
As discussed in Chapter 1, there are multiple and conflicting objectives for the SBIR program as defined in the legislation and in the Small Business Administration's stated goals, which identify research and development needs of a federal agency as a key objective of the program. While the literature has viewed SBIR as a small business finance program aimed at new firms with high growth potential, it is clear from the legislation authorizing SBIR and the stated goals of the program that the program was intended to have a broader impact.
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From page 96... ...
Additionally, the committee distinguished between firms that specialize in winning awards from one agency and firms that receive awards from multiple TABLE 4-6 Number of DOE SBIR/STTR Awardee Firms, by Award Count, 1983 to March 2018 Number of Awards Number of Awardee Awardee Firms in this Range, as a Received Firms in this Range Percentage of All Awardee Firms <3 1,630 63.6 3-9 706 27.6 10-19 130 5.1 20-29 65 2.5 50-99 24 0.9 99+ 8 0.3 Total 2,563 100.0 SOURCE: Committee calculations based on data obtained from the Small Business Administration.
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From page 97... ...
MARs that leverage multiple agencies have accounted for 25 to 35 percent of total DOE awards since 2000. The share of awards to vertical DOE MARs is much smaller, although most awardees have won awards from more than one agency -- only 880 out of the 2,563 DOE awardees (34 percent)
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From page 98... ...
40 40 35 35 30 30 25 25 20 20 15 15 10 10 5 5 0 0 Percentage of all SBIR/STTR Awards Percentage of all SBIR/STTR Awards 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 Fiscal Year Fiscal Year FIGURE 4-5 DOE "vertical" and "horizontal" MARs' shares of DOE SBIR/STTR awards, FY 2000 to FY 2017. SOURCE: Committee calculations based on data obtained from the Small Business Administration.
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From page 99... ...
As shown in Table 4-7, a number of repeat winners were identified by DOE program managers as successes, often because they supplied specialized equipment and instrumentation for national labs. Discussions with high-volume award winners also indicate that certain firms acquire expertise, and even hire specialists, in SBIR/STTR application writing.10 This latter form of MAR may be responsible for some of the negative attention MARs receive for adopting a "shoot anything that flies" model.
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From page 100... ...
on the development and deployment of the MiProbe environmental sensor CTI Molecular Imaging Gene expression scanners 1985-1997 8 2,024,723 Acquired by Siemens 2005 Dirac Solutions, Inc. Battery-free RFIDs for secure 2011-2017 5 2,438,116 communications Euclid Techlabs Particle accelerators for high-energy 2002-2017 69 25,800,000 and nuclear physics applications Heliotrope Nano-structured window coatings 2013-2014 2 1,150,000 Kitware Custom software and R&D 2010-2019 43 19,522,830 Mikro Systems, Inc.
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From page 101... ...
Software for managing supply chains 2012-2017 4 1,529,999 Radiabeam Technologies IOTA quadruples and steering 2004-2019 94 40,435,749 Has received magnets multiple Phase III contracts from DOE labs Reservoir Labs, Inc. Cybersecurity for high-speed 2004-2017 20 9,886,880 computing networks Silicon Audio LLC Seismic sensors for seismic events or 2008-2016 4 1,987,066 nuclear explosion Skutek Instrumentation Multichannel digitizer for 2003-2017 7 3,530,953 experiments in nuclear physics Tetramer Technologies Membrane technologies 2003-2018 16 8,429,197 Xia LLC Radiation digitizers for spectroscopy 1990-2017 42 14,300,000 SOURCE: Small Business Administration, Department of Energy, and Crunchbase.
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