RISK / REWARD II
When you distill down a reviewer’s decision making process, you end up with a simple equation: funding = risk / reward. How do you strike this balance so that you receive funding? Let us first explore the components of risk.
Risk has a number of components. These include:
The inherent risk of the proposed set of studies
The inherent risk of the true market size
Controllable risk of experimental design
Controllable risk of experimental execution
Controllable risk of experimental interpretation
Reward has one major component: Inherent Significance: what impact will this product have in its field of use and how starved is the field for this product?
In this current blog, I will address the controllable risks on the experimental side.
Experimental risk comes in a number of forms. You can reduce all forms of these risks to near zero in the reviewers’ minds by providing the appropriate preliminary data.
If the experimental design is not well established and you have not previously used such a design, then provide some preliminary data to show that you can accomplish your goals.
This same reasoning holds for execution and interpretation. Show that you can accomplish a task that has high risk. Show that you can collect data that can be interpreted. These do not have to be complete studies. The studies just have to show that there is little risk of project failure due to these factors.
Tailor the experiments so that they directly address an issue in the application. Any studies that are to focused on an aspect of the application can end up confusing hurried reviewers. You only have to confuse one in three hurried reviewers to create an otherwise avoidable problem for your self. In this regard, never use preliminary data to try and prove a new idea and never use the data to try and impress a reviewer. This will probably not help you to achieve your goal of getting a fundable score and will very likely work against you.
For more specific and additional information on this topic, click on this link: High Level SBIR/STTR Grant Writing Techniques.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me or go to SBIR-STTRgrantshelp.com.
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