Azavea was awarded a research grant by the National Science Foundation in December, 2006. This was our third such award in two years, and we are pretty proud. Usually, private companies are not allowed to be recipients of government grants, which are primarily awarded to universities, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. But these grants are different. They are part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The SBIR program was started in the 1982 by the National Science Foundation and now includes a dozen federal agencies.

SBIR grants and contracts are awarded based on a competition with each federal agency having its own variations on the rules, but with a largely similar format. The process is separated into two phases. In Phase I, companies submit innovative ideas for products and services that match a set of priorities issued by each agency. The agencies evaluate the ideas and award grants to the ones that appear both feasible and contribute to the objectives of each awarding agency. If the company wins a Phase I award – the process is extremely competitive with only 1 in 10 applications being successful – they have six months to prove the feasibility of the idea. If the idea is proven feasible, then they are allowed to submit a Phase II proposal.

Phase II awards are for larger amounts of money and are two-year grants, during which the company must develop a commercial product or service and bring it to market. Usually, the SBIR awards are not sufficient to complete the effort and require additional investment from the firm before they can be delivered to the marketplace. However, while limited in size, SBIR grants serve as a sort of venture capital effort that can fund high priority but risky projects that might not otherwise receive funding from the private market.

So why does Azavea go after these SBIR grants? We fund much of our R&D efforts internally, but sometimes we are presented with a complex technical hurdle that we are not sure how to solve. Or we have an idea for a product, but no client yet, and need a way to jump-start the development. Our DecisionTree geographic prioritization software, for example, was partially funded by a SBIR research contract from the Department of Agriculture. Under the grant, we tested the feasibility of developing a faster raster calculation engine. Through SBIR-funded research, Azavea is able to develop new technologies that we hope will both provide social value and grow into new products that create jobs and solve complex problems.