Push Button Paradise

The US government has a program called SBIR where small businesses can get research grants of $100k for six months, and that's just phase 1. Good work if you can get it. Yesterday, I went to a meeting to go over some of this.

The application process is, let's say, a bit complicated. Each government agency has to set aside 2.5% of their external research budget for the program, but they also get to define some extremely narrow research topics toward which the money will go. A competitive bid process is used to award the grant for each selected topic. Just finding all the places to look over the dozen participating agencies, and then matching up opportunites with what your small business would be able to provide is a a monumental task. And then there's the application paperwork...

The state of Arizona has a program called AZFAST which provides a meta-grant to a small business for the purpose of hiring a professional grant-writer to help with applying for a SBIR grant. Amazingly, one has to fill out a form to request an 25-page application for the meta-grant, which if granted, reimburses you for hiring a 3rd party to complete an applicaton for phase I of the actual grant. How many layers is that (so far)? Also you need a million dollars in commercial liability insurance before you can get the $5000 meta-grant. Yeah, lots of small businesses will have that.

At least they didn't read me any poetry. -m

Update: I found this nugget in one of the SBIR application kits: "If you do not have a Windows operating System, you will need to use a Windows Emulation program to submit an application using Grants.gov." It goes on to point to a PureEdge site that basically says that their "MacIntosh" support basically amounts to 'go buy Virtual PC from Microsoft'.

There is an alternative though: you can "follow instructions in the Federal Register notice to obtain a waiver to the electronic submission requirement no later than two weeks before the application deadline date." Yay.

Update 2: In the hostile-to-Mac department, the IRS "Virtual Small Business Workshop" CD-ROM has minimum system requirements of Pentium Processor, WIN 95/98/2000/NT 4.0, Windows Media Player 6.4 or higher, and a Recommended browser of Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher.

posted at: 17:15 | under: 2005-05 | 0 comment(s)