On 3/16/12 5:35 AM, Chuck Harris wrote:
I was of the understanding that SBIR's results are in
the public domain.... that however, doesn't mean that
a patented receiver that uses the SBIR results cannot
be had.
You too can use the results of this SBIR and patent
your receiver's special features.
Unfortunately, this is not the case..
SBIR is different from many other government procurement mechanisms: it
explicitly encourages retention of proprietary rights by the innovator.
The idea is to get small businesses (the SB) to do something useful
for the government, by providing seed money (phase 1 100k, Phase 2 1M),
but mostly, to get the SB to be able to become commercially successful
(in the Phase 3, not funded by government). In theory (probably more
than in practice), the SBIR is supposed to find commercial customers for
their technology (i.e. the commercial customer isn't supposed to be the
government). And you have to describe those plans in your SBIR
proposal. Although, having both written and read a lot of SBIR
proposals.. that aspect is pretty thin, and the bar is pretty low. For
instance, in microdevices, you might be developing a microwave low noise
amplifier, so you can make a hand waving assertion that there's a
potential market for millions, if not billions of these for personal
communication devices, direct broadcast satellite TV, radars, collision
detection, metrology for automatic bread slicers, etc.
Think of SBIR (and related STTR) as government paid angel investment
with no equity participation.
Full disclosure here.. my entire income was derived from SBIR (and
follow on) contracts for several years, and I don't think the government
got a particularly bad deal. We developed something useful for the
government, although, granted, the government was the only feasible (and
legal) customer when you are developing certain kinds of things. And
indeed, it did lead to a successful phase 3, with a different part of
the government buying the product than had funded the original SBIR work.
I think of SBIR as replacing "company funded R&D/IRAD)" for the big
contractors.
And even in normal government contracting, these days, to save money
when funding research and development, the government generally gets
"government purpose rights". That is, the government gets a license to
use the stuff (and they can hire another contractor to execute that
use), but if you're not the government, you have to pay the going rate.
The big exception would be if *civil servants* are doing the work, in
which case it is generally not subject to copyright, nor are patent
royalties required. Bear in mind that with the pressure to reduce the
number of civil servants, a LOT of the work of the government, even at
government labs, is done by contractor personnel, and it depends on the
nature of the contract.
Another wrench in the "taxpayer funded research not available to the
general public" is the Bayh-Dole act, which says that if the government
pays an educational research institution (e.g. Universities and
colleges), the institution gets first crack at the IP. The Government
gets a "fully paid non-exclusive license", but the university is free to
commercialize the development. This was designed to encourage the
nascent biotech industry for the most part, but has a pretty pervasive
effect in many areas. It's also lead, in my opinion, to a more ruthless
and competitve, non-disclosing research environment in academia.
Everyone thinks they'll have the key to the next Genentech or SUN (as in
Stanford University Network).
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