Choices & FY2006 Data from the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases has some great advice for National Institutes of Health (NIH) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant applicants on choosing an “institute and center” (IC) and requesting a budget. The key takeaways are:
- Each IC’s success rate varies dramatically from year to year. So don’t bother picking one IC over another because you think it’s less selective.
- The unpredictability in each IC’s success rate is a consequence of the tradeoff between Phase I and II awards. Since Phase II awards are significantly larger than Phase I awards, small changes in the number of Phase II awards have large consequences for the number of Phase I awards. And the number of Phase I awards in one year feeds back into the number of Phase II awards in the following year.
- Applications submitted for the December deadline have the shortest wait to receive funding. Some April deadline applications can wait up to 17 months for funding because of backlogs.
- Respond to a program announcement (PA) only if your proposal exactly matches the PA.
- Half of Phase I award recipients not responding to a PA received funding in excess of the standard $100,000.
- 14.7% of applications receive funding on their first try. 34% receive funding on their third try.
- The median annual award for Phase II SBIR grants was $416,000.
The first point was particularly interesting to me. On an SBIR grant I wrote last summer, one of the criteria I used for choosing the IC was a ranking of the expected value of their Phase I and II awards (success rate multiplied by average award). Now I realize that was a futile exercise in most cases. Although, it does appear from the graph on page six that a couple of ICs can be singled out. The National Eye Institute and the National Human Genome Institute are less selective in general, and that the National Library of Medicine is generally the most selective.
