Letters to The Editor

Re: Uncle Sam: The New VC?

If Uncle Sam were a VC, he'd be bankrupt. SBIR is merely a funding program for government R&D. Almost every program in every agency merely funds the kind of work it funds with the other 97.5% of its budget. Some want gadgets and some want knowledge; no one cares about financial success for the company.

If SBIR were having financial success the politicians would want to measure it. Instead, every attempt to measure its economic return is squelched. Neither agencies nor beneficiaries want any economic measurement to expose their practice of doing nothing more than they would have done anyway.

It's not exactly corporate welfare because the government gets what it pays for - R&D. It only survives because Congress need not fight any appropriations battles every year. The sacred American small business gets an automatic slice of the pie and the politicians get to make warm noises about their love for small business. There is little evidence to show that for government R&D, small business is any more efficient than large government contractors. No study has ever shown that SBIR produced more innovation, nor more of anything else, that would not have been produced if SBIR had never existed.

A simple test is available: let Congress make SBIR voluntary in the agencies. SBIR would disappear in a New York heartbeat.

Carl Nelson
Carl Nelson Consulting
www.carl-nelson.com