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Toward an assessment of the US Small Business Innovation Research Program at the National Institutes of Health

The Small Business Innovation Development Act of 1982, which established the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, is arguably the hallmark policy initiative in the United States to support technology development and commercialization in small firms. While scholars have studied this program in detail, there has yet to be a systematic assessment of how well it is meeting its legislated goals of stimulating technological innovation and increasing private sector commercialization. We use a unique set of data on projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) SBIR program to assess the extent to which these program goals are being met. We find that, relative to a counterfactual control group, NIH can be characterized as supporting, on average, the development of high commercialization risk technologies, and we suggest that this finding aligns with the goals of the SBIR program and may in fact be for the common weal.