Case Study-Small Business Technology Infusion

The successful development and market insertion of a financially successful new product requires technology, marketing, manufacturing, and luck. This paper suggests various steps in the process that are critical to success. More specifically, the paper deals with the special problems encountered by small business. The analysis is presented in light of the Small Business Innovative Research program (SBIR) which is an effort by the US government to enable the development of new high technology products and the successful establishment of business enterprises that will ultimately contribute to the GNP and tax base. It is not an entitlement program. Competition for contracts is fierce. The paper identifies a chain of events that must be successfully navigated in order to insure small enterprise survival and profitable product insertion into the US business base. A model program is used to define and describe how each step in the process was accomplished toward the ultimate success of the product. This model is an actual SBIR derivative event that has resulted in a successful product that not only completely satisfied the customer demands but also resulted in the spin-off of a family of other products that have since been sold into other commercial applications. 1 2 The purpose of this paper, is to highlight some of the issues that must be addressed by small business when attempting to both develop a high technology product and introduce it into the marketplace. This will be done by examining a successful product development history. It is done in the interest of "lessons learned" that may be of value for future small business enterprises. The example chosen happened to be a Phase 3 SBIR (Small Business Innovative Research) program. For this reason, a brief introduction of the SBIR process comes first.