The U S Small Business Technology Transfer Sttr Program

Today's knowledge economy is driven in large part by the nation's capacity to innovate. One of the defining features of the U.S. economy is a high level of entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurs in the United States see opportunities and are willing and able to assume risk to bring new welfare-enhancing, wealth-generating technologies to the market. Yet, although discoveries in areas such as genomics, bioinformatics, and nanotechnology present new opportunities, converting these discoveries into innovations for the market involves substantial challenges. The American capacity for innovation can be strengthened by addressing the challenges faced by entrepreneurs. Public-private partnerships are one means to help entrepreneurs bring new ideas to market. The Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) and the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program form one of the largest examples of U.S. public-private partnerships. In the SBIR Reauthorization Act of 2000, Congress tasked the National Research Council with undertaking a comprehensive study of how the SBIR program has stimulated technological innovation and used small businesses to meet federal research and development needs and with recommending further improvements to the program. When reauthorizing the SBIR and STTR programs in 2011, Congress expanded the study mandate to include a review of the STTR program. This report builds on the methodology and outcomes from the previous review of SBIR and assesses the STTR program.

The U.S. Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Program: An Assessment and an Evaluation of the Program is intended to expand the National Academies' report and set a stage for more in depth studies in the future of the STTR program by offering a systematic analytical overview of the STTR program and tying that overview to a qualitative/quantitative assessment and evaluation of the program given the limited data collected by and available from the NRC. In addition, this is an effort to orientate readers to a number of nuances of the STTR program that were beyond the scope of the National Academies' report. A secondary purpose is to highlight the economic importance of the STTR program itself.The remainder of this monograph is organized as follows. The legislative background for the STTR program is discussed in Section 2. Section 3 explains program assessments and program evaluations from a conceptual perspective. Section 4 describes the nature of the NRC's dataset used in this study, and based on that dataset a systematic analytical overview of the STTR program is presented. Section 5 presents a qualitative/quantitative assessment of the STTR program followed by a qualitative/quantitative evaluation of the STTR program in Section 6. Section 7 offers a summary of the paper and some concluding observations and additional suggestions for future NRC-led studies.