MEDIA NOTE: The University of Virginia will host a Small Business Innovation Research and Development Workshop at The Boar's Head Inn Country Resort, Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 24-25. There will be an awards ceremony at 7 p.m. on Wednesday in a tent on the lawn, with an all-day workshop from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday in the Ballroom. Roland Tibbetts, who designed the federal SBIR program, will speak at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday. Places are still available for interested business representatives; more than 250 people from around the state already have signed up. U.S. Government Earmarks R&D Opportunities for Small, High-Tech Firms GROWING NUMBERS OF VIRGINIA COMPANIES TAP FEDERAL DOLLARS CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Sept. 9 -- The scene: A battlefield littered with casualties. Tiny sensors, computers and radio transmitters built into military uniforms report vital life signs of the wounded to a remote computer that guides scarce paramedic and evacuation personnel first to those whose lives can be saved by immediate attention. One day in the not-so-distant future, small sensors and computers may help emergency medical technicians, in military and civilian life, evaluate trauma injuries and determine the kind of treatment needed. Especially during a war or natural disaster when hundreds of people are injured simultaneously, the ability to quickly identify those who can be saved and direct help to them would enhance the efficiency of limited emergency equipment and highly skilled personnel while saving lives. And how will this come about? Through the transfer of advanced technology now being developed for the U.S. military into the commercial sphere. Barron Associates Inc., a Charlottesville-based technical consulting company, is developing algorithms, or step-by-step mathematical computations, for the U.S. Army for software that will speed emergency medical triage in the field. "Medical Decision Algorithms for Pre-Hospital Injury Severity and Risk Assessment," a two-year contract that began last April, is one of 32 such research contracts that Barron Associates has been awarded under the federal government's Small Business Innovation Research program (SBIR). Designed by Roland Tibbetts at the National Science Foundation in 1977, the voluntary program became mandatory in 1983 after Congress passed legislation requiring federal agencies that spend more than $100 million per year on research and development (R&D) to set aside a small percentage of their contracts for small companies. Currently, 10 federal agencies, which account for about 98 percent of Washington's R&D spending, spend about $1 billion a year with small companies (fewer than 500 employees), out of their annual R&D budgets of about $65 billion. Before the SBIR program was created, small companies fueled the nation's economic engine, generating exciting new ideas and creating new jobs, but had a difficult time winning federal R&D contracts. "The goal of the SBIR program was to open essentially all federal R&D to small companies," Tibbetts said. "The program has done that." In designing SBIR, Tibbetts wanted to help fund "high-risk, potentially high-payoff ideas from small, high tech firms," while at the same time setting the stage to convert research on government needs into technological innovations with commercial potential. In this way, the program stimulates private-sector employment, keeps the United States on the cutting edge of new technology and creates new products that benefit consumers and the country as a whole. The SBIR program is highly competitive. Only one in seven competing companies wins initial, so-called Phase I, contracts with the federal agencies (a six-month time frame, covering research costs up to $100,000) while only one in three of the initial winners goes on to obtain additional funding in a Phase II award (a two-year time frame, covering research costs up to $750,000). In Phase III, companies secure their own, private-sector funding after the initial government investment has lowered the technical risk to levels acceptable to private investors. Since 1983, when the law took effect, federal agencies -- the Department of Defense, NASA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Commerce, Energy, Agriculture, Transportation and Education -- have channeled more than $6 billion in federal R&D spending to small companies participating in the SBIR program. Last year in Virginia, about 200 companies won SBIR grants and contracts worth $50 million, up from $30 million two years earlier, according to K.C. Das, director of the Office of Innovative Technology at the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. By getting the word out about the SBIR program through statewide workshops, which he has organized, Das hopes to boost the participation of Virginia companies in the program to $100 million over the next five years. (The 1998 conference will be at Virginia Tech and the 1999 conference at the Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon.) While systematic records have not been kept of corporate revenues resulting directly from the program, Tibbetts researched the experiences of 50 companies that participated in the early years of the NSF program. Since then, these companies' sales from products developed with SBIR funding have topped $9 billion, 30 times the NSF's total investment in SBIR awards. These companies employed 1,250 people when they won their first SBIR awards. By 1995, they had added more than 10,000 net new jobs and obtained nearly $1 billion in subsequent private investment. Just as important as winning funding in the initial stages of new technology development has been the collaboration between high-tech companies and university researchers. Almost all of the SBIR projects run by the NSF and NIH involve collaboration, in the form of consulting or subcontracts, with university experts. "SBIR is the greatest boon to university-small business collaborations that there ever was," Tibbetts said. "It's improved the quality of business proposals while creating new opportunities for university scientists to increase the public benefit from their research." ### September 8, 1997 For more information about the workshop or the SBIR program, call Dr. K.C. Das, director, Office of Innovative Technology, Department of Environmental Quality, at (804) 698 4184. Bobbe Nixon, director of research development at U.Va.'s School of Engineering and Applied Science, at (804) 924-6261, also can answer questions about the workshop. For help in reaching these contacts, call Charlotte Crystal, public information officer, at (804) 924-6858. Television reporters should call our TV News office at (804) 924-7550.