Evaluation and Recommendations for Improvement of the Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program

Abstract : In fiscal year 2004, the Director of the Department of Defense Small Business Technology and Industrial Base Office (SBTIBO) requested that the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a division of the RAND Corporation, examine the Department of Defense's (DoD's) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The purpose of the research project was to provide DoD with insights into the current status of its SBIR program in terms of the department's transformational technology priorities, innovation, and the small business defense industrial base. Following that initial assessment, the project's objective became the recommendation of policy options for making the DoD SBIR program more responsive to the needs of the department. This documented briefing provides both a record of the research that was conducted in the second half of 2004 and the recommendations that resulted from it. The project consisted of four parts. First, the study team gained a broad understanding of the SBIR program. Next, the team evaluated the DoD SBIR program's success in terms of the current set of goals for the program as measured by the department's current set of SBIR metrics, as well as by additional RAND-developed metrics. Since the DoD SBIR program's goals reflect little of DoD's broader national security mission, the third part of the study developed a set of DoD-specific goals for its SBIR program that better reflect the national security mission of the department. This task also entailed suggesting a number of additional SBIR metrics to assess progress against the proposed goals. The study concludes with a number of policy options, which, if implemented, could make the DoD SBIR program more responsive to the department's broader defense mission.