Sign Arkansas Profit Sharing Agreement Template Mobile

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the broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen only mode good morning everyone and welcome to today's webinar introduction to the small business innovation research small business technology transfer program throughout today's presentation i'll often refer to this as the sbir program but know that i'm speaking of both sbir and sttr i'm rebecca todd your webinar organizer and presenter i work as innovation specialist for the arkansas small business and technology development center we are taxpayer funded to provide confidential one-on-one consulting training and market research services for entrepreneurs and established businesses across the state we have been working in arkansas for 40 years now we have nine regional offices throughout arkansas that allow us to help entrepreneurs and established companies across the state each of our regions has at least one university-based center through our sonar's completely awarded federal and state technology grants asb tdc is able to offer continued outreach through events like this webinar where we share information about the sbir and ctr program for statewide and national audiences we help entrepreneurs with each step of preparing and submitting small business innovation research for sbir proposal applications as well as state level applications for supplemental technology commercialization funds for our industry database subscriptions we are able to locate market data to help our technology clients prepare key sections of their svr proposals like the commercialization plans everyone who has registered for today's event will be receiving a copy of the slides as well as a link to the reporting within two days via go to webinar email so before we start let's take a moment to make sure that everyone is ready and familiar with go to webinar so first you should have a control panel on the right side of your screen you can minimize this panel by clicking on the arrow button that's orange in the upper left corner you can expand the panel by clicking on the same button and second you have the ability to submit questions using the question pane which is located near the bottom of the control panel i do encourage you to submit questions throughout today's presentation because we will have time reserved at the end to answer your questions before we get started i want to just briefly introduce myself so again my name is rebecca todd and i am innovation specialist for the arkansas small business and technology development center or asb tdc for short i've been in this role for 11 years now and i work across the state to help entrepreneurs and established companies explore and respond to funding opportunities in the sbir sctr program asb tdc has helped arkansas companies win over 25 million in sbr sctr funds to date to supplement these awards asb tdc has helped clients win nearly 2 million in state level funds i studied um animal science and biology at the university of arkansas fayetteville where i earned bachelor and master degrees and then i studied professional technical writing at ua little rock where i earned my master's in the arts so early on in my time with aspdc i also became a certified business advisor and technology counselor with that let's go ahead and get started so this is an overview of the different topics we'll be talking about today and every day the arkansas small business and technology development center helps our kansans take ideas and turn them into businesses our work with tech companies is project-based so we tend to have long-term relationships with our clients we love to help from entrepreneurs as they follow their dreams and in turn build a state's economy i mentioned an introduction that we have nine locations throughout the state to serve clients in those regional areas and this is a depiction of what that looks like across arkansas our clients include people who are starting new businesses from scratch buying established businesses looking to expand their existing businesses or commercializing research for new technology i work with entrepreneurs in that last category many of them are seeking funds through the state and federal channels or licensing royalties and private investment i specialize in assisting clients who want to pursue federal sbir sdpr contracts and grants this is a snapshot of how we helped companies and all throughout the state in the past year you can see that we helped arkansas companies secure 72 million in total capital infusion start 190 new businesses support over 2 000 jobs and grow sales by over 60 million we meet our clients where they're at with their specific business needs rather than offering a one-size-fits-all approach our consulting services are confidential as asptdc continues to seek innovative ways to serve our clients needs we have recently engaged with subject matter experts in areas like human resources digital marketing branding agriculture in other areas if one or these services are of interest to you please take advantage of them through our statewide network you can do this by either reaching out to your current consultant to access this service or to register online via our client portal we also offer programming all throughout the year on a variety of different topic areas you can find our upcoming events on the events menu tab of our website that i've linked here again you will be receiving these slides after today's presentation usually we do offer events in person at each of our regional centers but for the time being we'll continue to hold virtual events that are led by staff as well as guest speakers our center subscribes to a number of proprietary industry databases and these allow us to access current information across a variety of industry areas through these resources we can help clients learn more about their competition their customers and trends in their fields of interest through our geographic information system we can map out critical information for our potential business locations this information includes things such as customer demographics drive times and competitor locations with information gathered from the secondary market research and gis mapping our clients are strongly positioned to make informed business reflected in their applications for funding my focus as innovation specialists is on supporting our state's technology-based companies this includes all companies and entrepreneurs that are interested in conducting new often long-term research and development work for the purpose of developing new products and services that can be sold in commercial market or to federal agencies applying for funding through the small business innovation research and small business technology transfer program is a detailed multi-step process and we guide clients through every stage of it so as you can see while sbr and sttr are my areas of expertise that's just one thread of the asb tdc web of services we do assist clients with every aspect of business creation operation and management because they're all interwoven a client may come to us for one reason such as help with a funding proposal and then end up working with us on exporting or their marketing strategy our consultants see each project through from start to finish and now i want to take a minute to share with you our spr success story video that features awardee companies from across the state hopefully the audio will be pretty good for you if there is any choppiness just bear in mind you'll be able to listen to this after the fact through that link that's provided the valley of death that everyone talks about it really is a valley of death you have all these research technologies [Music] [Music] the major funding mechanisms to help reliability technologies develop well by going through the sccr and sdr process which milestone would have been able to achieve alone and once we started moving forward idea and this time we wanted to get commercialized we reached out to aspcc we helped us develop our sbir applications and as well as best pcr applications we are basically trying to reinvent water treatment the old processes or wastewater treatment related contaminants we want to come up with new innovative technologies that get an address you know from the very beginning when shelby and i are starting the company i learned very quickly that there is no way this pitch to say you have nothing to sell yeah so npir and we filled that gap it's essentially free money it's non-negotiable and you get to test out our and get it to hopefully a prototype stage before we go looking for more investment spir is awarded by government organizations including usda the nsf and a few others a lot of funding to create innovative products within our country the very first time that i applied to usda sbir and i won the problem i was trying to address is with small-scale hydroponic farmers i'm working to increase their production capacity with medical investment but i wouldn't have received that award if it wasn't for the arkansas small business and technology development i had never written a grant before the center helped me understand all the groups that you have to jump through to when an sbir which arguably would find market research yesterday during the spring program sp tdc has been mental uh you know uh exploration and uh navigating smooth complicated sbl producing process most of my recent work is aligned around uh issues direction under the financial department defense we have worked for development with proportionation or in front of the federal lobby have a real speech basically measures researchers scientists as a professor i do not really know much about it but this is where asp we have placed and based online much of the things that i don't know how to do they help with the their process they they their advice for me and that's their proposal they buy some household properties so it can go from very base very complex and that's what picks them up for people the help and services provided by the asc has been incredible but everything from those market research booklets that we get be able to write our commercialization plan and be able to write the market competition aspects of the proposals you would not be able to do that one of the great things our company found when we began working with asbc was that you don't have to become little rock it's arkansas small business it's arkansas economic development these resources are available to you wherever you are ran into a member of the chamber in our local very building was able to put him in touch with the afbcdc to get assistance with somebody that i'm working on i just had an idea i had this problem in this desire to solve a problem for hydroponic farmers but that's all i had i didn't have business experience and so when i reached out to our default home business technology development center they really held my hand through this process and it really helped me win [Music] i hope you enjoyed the the stories that were shared about some of these companies across the state all in different fields of science so i'm very excited to get to hear from them and get a moment to have their story shared today we've helped arkansas companies win 63 awards and several others are currently pending a negotiation with the funding agencies so just in summary asptc is a results driven high performing program committed to providing quality services that meet needs of arkansas entrepreneurs unique among arkansas economic building organizations we serve businesses from any county in the industry sector and at any stage of development so at 3.7 billion annually the small business innovation research small business technology transfer sbr sctr program is the largest source of funds for innovative companies conducting research and development work at the proof of concept stage these awards take the form of grants or contracts from the participating federal government agencies unlike other types of funds these awards are non-dilutive and they don't require the company to match them the program does require there to be an alignment between project ideas and proposals and specific agency identified research topic areas each agency has its own set of research topics for which they seek responsive sbr applications each agency's research topics reflect their mission and objectives federal agencies having at least 100 million in their external research and development budgets are congressionally mandated to participate in the sbr program they just set aside 3.2 percent of this budget for sbir of the 11 age agencies the five largest have at least one billion in their external research and development budget and these five agencies also participate in sttr which they reserve 0.45 of their external r d budget initially sbir sdtr products have high risk but also have high potential payoff this means that the risk of failure is high but if the long-term project efforts are successful then the payoff is huge in terms of significantly improved solutions for addressing critical market needs the payoff for successful spr and ctr projects also includes increased number of high pay technical jobs and new business growth since oversight for this program is provided by the small business administration or sba the applicant company must meet sba's definition of a small business so the company must be primarily owned and operated by u.s citizens or permanent residents companies are usually 500 or fewer employees although there can be some exceptions based on industry area the company must employ a principal investigator also known as pi who will lead the company's research efforts for sbir the pi needs to be at least 51 employed by the small business at the time of award for sttr most agencies don't require the pi to be primarily employed by the company but however the pi does need to be qualified to oversee the work and devote a minimum percentage of time on the project at a national level there are a few companies that i wanted to highlight that all got their start as sbir awardees so at the top we have qualcomm this is the world's leading provider of wireless technology and services if you have a cell phone there's a good chance that you're using qualcomm products every day as the company grew in the 1980s sbr funding allowed qualcomm to hire engineers and begin to develop chips qualcomm was awarded 1.5 million in sbr funds from the national science foundation and the department of defense and this money allowed them to reach the consumer application market next we have symantec symantec is a global leader in providing security storage and systems management solutions when symantec acquired norton orton sales tripled within a year symantec was actually the very first recipient of an sbr grant in 1982 and was able to use svr funds to support its breakthrough product called q a software which generated 50 million dollars in sales and last we have irobot corporation irobot designs and builds robots that make a difference my robot was founded in 1990 by massachusetts institute of technology roboticists who had the vision of making practical robots a reality the svr program contributed to more than 16 million dollars in funding to develop robots that are now used in government industry and for consumer applications such as the roomba i hope these examples help to illustrate how powerful the sbr program can be in helping a company grow from an innovative idea all the way to being a major industry player the spi program is not meant to be a long-term funding source to sustain a small business but it is intended to help companies move all the way from the idea stage to commercial readiness level for new and needed innovations the program offers a way to take advantage of small business and university partner expertise to address agency identified critical need areas often large industry players don't have the bandwidth or the interest to conduct the long-term research projects that are required to fully develop and to vet new innovations for the market for this reason large companies like lockheed martin are interested in collaborating with small businesses in the second phase of the sbr program to develop innovations that support their mission and goals this program is also inte ded to support economic growth across the nation and lead to more high-paying jobs one thing to keep in mind with the program is that it does require the project team to learn the language of business so that they can effectively communicate the value of their proposed technology potential customers and partners and to begin to build those professional relationships early endeavours said there are some things that spr does not fund basic research refers to traditional academic projects in which the outcomes are shared primarily within the academic community often this is done through journal publications or in scientific conferences there's not really a push to move new innovations to market but rather to prove scientific hypotheses through incremental research and development most agencies in the sbir program support development of disruptive technologies that offer groundbreaking solutions with the potential to create new industries there is little interest in non-disruptive technologies that rely on incremental improvements to establish technology although spr funds can be used to support low rate initial manufacturing especially in phase two if a company is ready for full-scale manufacturing they are likely in a growth stage beyond the realm of sbir so this program began as part of congressional legislation back in 1982 esky small business innovation development act or sbid act made it possible to award federal research grants to small businesses to support federal research and development needs sbr agencies are required to set aside 3.2 percent of their external research and development budget for this program and as we also said before the sttr set aside is 0.45 percent sbr needs to be periodically reauthorized by u.s congress december of 2016 congress reauthorized the program through september 2022 through the national defense authorization act so now let's take a look at the 11 agencies that participate in the sbir program so these are all the agencies that do participate and since it started the program arkansas companies have succeeded in winning sbr awards for most of these agencies at the top in blue bullet points we have the agencies that issue primarily grant awards at the bottom in the orange bullet points these are agencies that usually issue contract awards the difference being the grant agencies like nih and usda tend to have topics that are broad in scope so they're interested in helping to meet the needs of the general public one example might be that the department of health and human services or nih is seeking treatments for cancer on the other hand the contract agencies like department of defense and nasa tend to have topics that are very narrow in scope this is because they want to address internal agency needs first so one example of a department of defense topic might be design of a component of a military vehicle or design of infrared camera to detect biological air assaults contact agencies can and often do engage phase two and sometimes phase one awardees in something called sole source contract agreements this allows them to continue to fund the business and its partners to develop technology that they need for internal use until that need is met the company can then sell to customers in the general commercial market so let's talk a bit now about the roles that the principal investigator and subcontractors contribute to sbir projects the principal investigator does need to be primarily employed by the company at the time of award that's not the case at the time of application so these positions can be pending notice of agency funds whoever served in the role of pi needs to be prepared to provide oversight for the entire project and report the results to the agency often they look for things like a progress report as well as a final report with the sbir program up to one third or 33 percent of the total effort can be outsourced to partners and these can include university partners federal laboratories or other for-profit businesses and the only catch is that all the work does need to be conducted the united states when you go into phase two which we'll get into the phases in a bit you can outsource more up to 50 of the work and again here are the list of agencies in the small business technology transfer program these are the biggest agencies in the entire sbir program they have at least one billion and their external research and development budgets the original intent of sttr was to facilitate the transfer of technology developed by a research institution through the entrepreneurship of a small business as ctr was established 10 years after sbir so 1992. this is an attractive option to many small businesses because it does allow the company high-level access to university research and to academic professionals this partnership can offset the risk and expense of these research projects up to 60 of the research effort can be performed by the university partner or other entities under sttr as you can see with the sttr program the business does need to perform at least 40 percent of the project effort as measured by the budget and the research institution partner the primary one needs to perform at least 30 of the work but up to 60 total can be outsourced to partners when when you go to the sttr route this program does introduce entrepreneurial skills to high-tech research efforts unlike in sbir most of the agency's sttr programs do not require the pi to be primarily employed by the business one exception to this is the national science foundation even in sttr the pis do need to contribute a certain level of effort to a project and this percentage effort requires is required varies by agency non-profit federal research laboratories can be instrumental to developing high-tech innovations when you go the sttr route there does need to be something called an intellectual property agreement between the business and the primary nonprofit institution partner and this just details the allocation of intellectual property rights and the rights to carry out follow-on research development or commercialization activities so things like royalty expectations when the university researcher can publish information in a journal article things like that so as i mentioned before some agencies award grants others do contracts some even do a mixture of both an ej agency has different research topics and separate solicitation cycles which means that there are multiple opportunities in a given year to respond to these opportunities across the different agencies in phase one the award size is between a hundred thousand and two hundred fifty thousand dollars project performance lasts anywhere from six months to a year in phase two the awards also vary depending on the size of the agency so they're between 400 000 and a million plus dollars the largest agencies are nih and department defense and the project performance period is two years in a phase two i also want to mention that in arkansas there are state funds available from the arkansas economic development commission or aedc and this is available at what's called phase zero and in the form of matching grants for phase one and two we at the asptdc can help companies apply for supplemental state funds through aedc so here we're just summarizing award ranges for phase one and two although the sbir program doesn't have a phase three many companies can obtain non-spir federal dollars through sole source contract agreements with the funding agencies after they've won at least a phase one award in addition some agencies do offer some supplemental funds to extend phase one and two projects as needed after you've won at least a phase one award through this program you've satisfied something called fair and open competition which is part of federal acquisition regulation part six in case you want to do some extra reading on that but just in a nutshell what that means is that after a company wins a phase one the agency doesn't have to require that company to compete with any others before it can choose to continue funding it through additional non-sbir contracts so this program is a highly competitive one since you are competing with companies all across the nation chances of winning in a phase one depend by agency but vary between 10 and 25 after you've won a phase one your odds of success do go up because you've proven credibility of your team of your of your idea all of these things to the agency and so your odds of winning are between thirty and fifty percent asp tdc tracks its successes each quarter companies that win awards through sbr and ctr and we have seen a higher than average win rates for phase one and two among our clients compared to these national averages i want to take a moment to talk about intellectual property this is something that's important to begin thinking about before you even start writing your phase one application and although you don't need to secure patent or other ip in order to win sbro dollars it's still important to begin planning for how you will protect your product or service from being readily copied by competitors once it is available for sale in the marketplace so this act called by dole act was a critical component of helping researchers that receive federal dollars to start thinking in a more entrepreneurial way it's a piece of u.s legislation dealing with intellectual property that originally arose from federal government funded research it was sponsored by two senators birch five indiana and bob dole of kansas and it did go into effect in 1980 so right about the time this sbr program got its start before the bi-doll act federal research funding contracts and grants obligated inventors wherever they worked to assign inventions that they made using federal funds to the federal government but when the buy adult act was passed it allowed universities small businesses or non-profit institutions to elect to pursue ownership of an invention in preference to the government so this was like i mentioned this is a way for for awardees to start thinking more in terms of how they can commercialize and be entrepreneurs have some ownership rights to the technology that they are working on developing they are expected to commercialize so this isn't something that that a company can keep rights to if they don't take actions to get out there in the market i do want to mention also the government retains something called marching rights and through marching rights the government can come in and require licenses to be granted or or to grant licenses in certain circumstances like in a national emergency but to date no federal agency has exercised march and rights rewarding companies are expected are expected to take the steps that are necessary to complete paperwork associated with their awards and to bring their technology to commercial market within the what was tied in frame so this should be anything that scared you off about the sbr program the marching rights so right now america is on a first to file system which is in line with the rest of the the world this means that as soon as you file a patent application with the u.s patent and trademark office that filing date serves as your placeholder in the system this means that others can't legally replicate your product or service and compete it with yours on the commercial market you do need to have legal counsel to help you through the steps of preparing and filing your patent but there are some preliminary searches that you can do on your own keep in mind that there's something called a provisional patent that you can apply for and this really just serves as a placeholder for protecting your idea for a one year period of time as you are in the early stages of developing your intellectual property you really can't disclose any information publicly about your product idea until that patent is filed so you need to think about how you can still secure potential customers this might be done through something called a non-disclosure agreement other steps that you can take on your own include things like doing a patent search through the uspto.gov website this is just a keyword search you also search sbr and sdt are closed topics and prior awards and this is something i'm actually going to walk you through the process of doing because that's something that's part of my day to day so i've just put on some screenshots here rather than trying to walk you through this um in a live way and this will hopefully provide a good reference point for you as well if you go to the official site for this program called sbr.gov there's a funding drop down menu you'll go there to get started and this is the search research topics that are closed the reason you want to do this is because many of the agencies especially the grant agencies tend to reissue the same topics from one funding cycle to the next so doing this work is giving you an idea of what what they're typically looking for even if they're not open right now to new applications it helps you to kind of get what agencies are most likely going to be a fit for you from this drop down menu you'll go to the topic areas option and then this is where you have the option to start entering in some keywords that align with your idea so just for the for fun we'll say you're interested in doing something involving robots and education we just type in robot education and then go to the search box and once you do this search you'll you'll pull up a list of several topics and what you can do is go through that list and capture the the ones that appear to be most relevant to you and this is just an example of how you could have an excel spreadsheet i have a template here for arkansas companies um to start tracking some of those key findings that way you're not trying to just email yourself lots and lots of information in a scattered way this keeps it all in one spot for you and you can get excuse me go back to it later and check it out and see which which one do you want to start with after you look at closed topics you then want to do the same kind of keyword search of prior awards now you want to do this because you want to see what companies have already received finding that maybe for related work um and just to verify that you still have a unique niche that you can occupy within the sbr landscape with your um with your project so again you go back to sbo.gov at this time you go to the reports drop down menu and then here you'll go to the award data option and enter in those same keywords that you already did the robot education you can see here this time at the bottom some of these awards that are going to pop up they give you a little bit of a synopsis of what the technology project look like um you can click on the hyperlink for the title to get that expanded out this is just something called abstract or summary all the awardees are expected to give a brief overview of what the project entails that doesn't have anything confidential in there but that's enough usually for you to get idea if that's really close to what you're doing or if it's not similar at all it's actually a good thing to see that there is some related work out there that has been funded that shows promise that there's likely still interest in your project as well but you definitely don't want to see anything that's duplicative or just so similar that the agency is going to be reluctant to want to fund something else that's right along something they've already funded particularly it's made it to the phase two level there are some cases where an award might not progress past phase one and so that's that could be still fair game to pursue again you want to track your key findings on here um whenever possible include things like the agency contact as well because that could be a situation where you might reach out to the funding agency if they didn't progress past page one for example i'm just to kind of get a sense of if the agency is still interested in a project that would respond to that topic area and we'll talk more about that in a little while another kind of market research to do is something called customer discovery it's really important to talk with several of your potential customers before you start planning to develop new solution for them this customer discovery work should reveal what kind of areas within their jobs they consider to be the most constrained by limitations of their current technology they can also share what elements of their solutions are effective and how their operating environment impacts performance ideally these customers are going to let you know what combination performance outcomes and price point would actually trigger their investment in a new solution you want to maintain a close professional relationship with these potential customers as you develop a new solution that serves their needs many agencies like to see strong support letters from from customers that are included in applications these letters help to demonstrate that you have a clear pathway to commercial market so definitely it's not ever too early to start building these relationships with customers if that's something that you you struggle with definitely reach out to us for some help on how to get started there i mentioned earlier too that asb tdc can help you with the secondary market research so our dedicated staff will locate the most relevant information for your company's project proposal and prepare a customized binder for you this information is something that would usually cost thousands of dollars to access online so definitely take advantage of that save yourself some money and time and let us help you with the secondary market research before you write which is the part that that i enjoy there are some technical steps to really make sure you're properly set up to do business with the federal government first you need to register your company and there's company numbers and federal registrations both that need to be done these are all free of charge and can be done online but you do need to do them early and in sequential order as i've laid them out here and that's the reason you want to do them early is because it can take two to six weeks for them to process it's not necessarily that it takes that long to do them it just it takes a long time in some cases for the system to process your information so the ein this is a number that should be automatically generated when you register your company in this state and these numbers are assigned to business entities by the internal revenue service for the purpose identification done in bradstreet number dmb this is a corporate database that contains information on business credit sales and marketing progress and then with under the federal registrations the first one listed is a system forwards management or sam.gov right beside that of the state of arkansas we have the arkansas procurement technical assistance center which is a group of wonderful consultants that are dedicated to helping with things like sam so i always refer my clients over to them to get hands-on assistance with completing this particular registration often other ones like grants.gov as well but they can really expedite that process for you and help you move through it quickly and some of the times the language is just confusing if you've not been exposed to that before and it can really slow you down some other ones i've listed here at sbr.gov and then a couple agency specific ones some agencies do have their own sites um like the nsf and nih so you'll just have to make sure that you're noticing that as you start going through the particular agency's funding opportunity also before you start writing it's important to engage the agency program manager who is associated with your research topic of interest and we discussed earlier contact agencies are are the ones like department of defense and nasa they usually can't provide extensive feedback on project ideas but what they can do is answer technical questions about the topic areas the reason they can't get is get as much in depth with you is because they have to make sure they're being mindful of of competitive bias and giving that appearance to any potential applicants because as you might remember they might later be your customer but they can't answer these technical questions for you one one thing to also keep in mind is that the agencies often include references and associations with their topics and this gives you clues about which elements that they consider to be important in responsive applications i've definitely noticed that with the department of defense for example and then we have the grant agencies on the other hand these are very open to communicating with you year round on your idea they can verify if it appears to be a strong fit for the research topic and whether it's appropriate scope for phase one so there definitely ones to reach out to and hopefully will give you some more in-depth feedback as to how to proceed with them so at this time i wanted to mention that we have coming up in arkansas something called sbr weak in the south arkansas this is um for some of you that might have maybe been exposed to this program longer than others and this is the version of svr road tour that's this 2020 version where this year we will have a virtual road tour and so on monday november 2nd we're going to see virtual panels and presentation featuring agency reps most of the agencies from those 11 agencies will actually be participating this is a really unique opportunity to get everyone gathered all in the same day to hear from them what do they seek to fund what are the common pitfalls and challenges that they see in applications to their programs what would they like to what kind of advice would they like to give potential applicants to them that kind of thing i definitely recommend coming to this i know virtually um but you'll you'll just need to sign up i'll put the link at the bottom here and another unique chance that you have is to actually engage with program managers from those participating agencies one-on-one later in the week on the friday november 6th so this again is a unique chance to to have meetings scheduled all across the day if you'd like where you discuss your project idea with these program managers really get a sense of if this is aligned with their mission objectives any suggestions that they have and how to make a stronger match for them and so i would definitely say take advantage of that you really want to make sure you establish these professional relationships no matter what before you start writing and submitting out your proposal and this time around and actually they've done this before and what you'll have to submit before you can schedule one-on-one meetings is something called a quad chart and so i wanted to put this up here give you an idea of what it entails and also want to say that you definitely expect to get feedback from me if you want to work together to draft this up before you submit it i'd be happy to help you with that so as you can see those four sections here technology development company introduction research need and opportunity technology development section this is where you're going to provide an overview of your technology or research area along with the current status of intellectual property protection the stage of development of your technology and the value proposition that you will be bringing to the customer your overview really only needs to be a couple sentences long this is a summary of your technology that you plan to commercialize once your product or service is on the market then you'll want to protect it from being readily copied by competitors by securing intellectual property or ip and this ip can take the form of a patent copyright or trade secret it could also be a combination of more than one of these things you don't have to have ip in order to win an award so it's definitely fine if you don't have that right now for the section all you really need to indicate is what kind that you do intend to secure before your technology reaches the commercial market the stage of development which is the next to last item on the quadrant for technology development this is really just referring to where is your technology currently at on the timeline of moving from an idea to being a sellable product or service if you're still very early in the process which is quite common all you need to do is write something to the effect of basic research your value proposition should state how your technology is going to improve lives of users or customers and as much as possible give an educated guess on on what the measurable impact would potentially be underneath technology development you can see this is a research need quadrant and this is where you put a statement about your primary objective and svr project so for those of you that are more university-based this is similar to your hypothesis what you what your objective is um at least in the phase one and maybe even looking ahead like phase one into what what's your long-term objective there the opportunity quadrant which is at the bottom right should identify the market need that will be addressed through your new solution also who is your specific user or customer who's going to get the most benefit from the technology and why is there a particular need for your product or service in the market if this is something that you're struggling with again please reach out to asptvc we can help you to look at the market landscape for that and finally you can see in the top right is the company introduction and this one's pretty self-explanatory and it's okay of course if you haven't yet established a company you would just put things like not applicable for any of these fields that don't apply but do include things about what your intent is what your plan is so that they can see which what you've got cooking down the pipeline and then for the week in the south prep course um of course today is really the kickoff for this four-part series that we're offering to help folks get ready for this for this unique event we have on september 15th another workshop called commercialization essentials which again will be through go to webinar i do encourage you to sign up for that all these are found in our events page which is at the bottom here on the link so i'll say sign up for all of these if you can commercialize it promote foundation essentials is like it sounds really helping you understand what it means to be successful as you move from doing laboratory or field research all the way to getting to the commercial market readiness level the next event that we have is on the 23rd we'll actually have an attorney talking to us about how to protect intellectual property and sbr and sdtr projects and also how to collaborate with partners and talk to customers without revealing too much information about what you're doing so being safe protecting your your trade secrets your proprietary information and last on the seventh we have a panel of awardees from across the state companies that have won sbr and sttr funds will be talking about their their story how they got started why spr was a great experience for them i'm really excited about that as well i want to mention some other helpful resources in addition to the ones that you can obtain through our center asbtc or similar ones in your states so sbr.gov again that's the federal site for this program has some wonderful tutorials that you can access through the resources menu when you go there you'll see that they have 18 different courses and three formats so if you're audio learner or visual it has something to accommodate everyone these are very topic specific and so i would say start at the beginning with program basics and take your time to really learn more this is very much an overview of the program here in this in this webinar today so take some time to go in a little bit deeper to learn more about it in arkansas we do have some supplemental state funds that i want you to be aware of too i touched upon these earlier but there's the technology transfer assistance grant or t tag which is also known as phase zero this is a five thousand dollar cost match that application companies can use to bring on a resource provider that can then work with them in collaboration with asptc to help advance their their proposal so that maybe they might engage someone that's got unique experience as a rewarding company themselves can help you with the writing process you might engage a subject matter expert to give you unique insight about the industry anything like that usually can be supported through this t-tag program there's also a technology development program or tdp and this is up to one hundred thousand dollars in royalty based investment it's direct investment by the state that's meant to help develop or validate a technology for commercialization the tdp program is flexible it's been used to bridge funding gaps in svr phase one and two grants to create prototypes and to develop commercial applications for new technology it could also be used to pay for the validation of university technology and the next one listed as a c capital investment program also known as scip this is meant to help companies with initial capitalization so usually if companies are a little bit farther along than the tdp program to qualify for this i would say maybe they want at least a phase two award at this point or the equivalent of that this program helps companies reach the point of commercialization and it's royalty based investment of up to five hundred thousand dollars usually that's made in smaller stage launches spr matching grant is one i'm very happy that we have here many other states have them as well if you're not from arkansas you might want to check out to see what your options are but this is a program that that companies can compete for to win up to fifty thousand dollars to match the phase one award it can be used to expand that grant and into the covering expenses that otherwise aren't allowed through the sbr program things like legal accounting other types of activities sometimes involving marketing as well phase two can be matched up to a hundred thousand dollars through this matching grant and at the moment um arkansas companies can receive i believe it's three maximum of these awards so sometimes a strategic thing to do is to save at least a little bit of that for your phase two awards tax incentives are also available and these include the equity investment tax credit this is best for companies that are at early stage but they're past family spend friends investments so maybe they're starting to look for angel investors these eligible companies will pay wages that are above the state and county average and the income tax credits that are issued through the program are equal to 33.3 percent of the amount invested by investor in the company we also have the research and development r d tax credit and this is best for companies that are about to take off in the commercial market and they anticipate significant growth for the first five years the qualified companies are going to be offering income tax credits equal to 33 percent of the qualified research and development expenditures incurred each year for up to five years so definitely if you're interested in those um please check out the aedc's science and technology division there's a lot more information there and if you want to apply for those please reach out to me we can help you with your application if you're not already subscribed i also want to encourage you to sign up for our our monthly newsletter it's called lab to launch and this is where we feature client success stories upcoming opportunities for sbr str funding new asptc programming and training events and you can sign up for that at the link that's provided here without want to thank everyone for their time and attention i'll put my contact information here and then this is just our just our logo slide we have some of our centers represented here i wanted to make sure those are included thanks again so much i'm going to now open up questions with everyone i'm just a reminder i will be sending out all the slides and the recording within a couple days so you'll have that not seeing any questions it seemed like at the beginning there were some audio issues but it got better so i'm glad you can hear that i'm going to go ahead and turn off the reco ding since our the main part of this is going to end okay so looks like we did have a question come in are your services available to companies in other states yes you definitely can get can reach another um resource like us in a different state let me show you how to do that probably the recording part is having issues so i'm just gonna let that go okay so what you'll do to find out what's in your state if you go to that sbr.gov page from here you can go to resources local assistants in the drop down and this is where you can then just select your state and you're in florida and what you can do from there they give you resource types to filter by we are a federal state technology awardee so searching by something like that will almost guarantee that that resource has knowledge specific to sbr ctr so you can check that button and maybe also a small business development center button hit the apply button so from here just pull up florida small business development center and you can click on that link there to get more information usually a point of contact is included there too but this place you can just keep going and get to their websites hopefully that will help you find a local resource for you all right someone asked please describe the differences between a typical nih grant and an sbir grant to the nih um that question's confusing the way it's supported to me oh i think i know what they're saying so um a lot a lot of nih grants are more for the university institutions so for example here in arkansas we have something called the university of arkansas for medical sciences a lot of those researchers are applying for nih grants for clinical trials or for other types of work just strictly to work in the laboratory and things like that so the process is quite a bit different for sbir i have worked with a lot of researchers that are familiar with other programs that say it's just night and day from from what they're used to an application it is quite a bit shorter i believe um the nih applications are only seven pages so you really have to be concise with the language that you include and tell tell a story that's that's compelling but also um just to the point um using the criteria that they're actually interested in in seeing you talk about so that's definitely something i can help give you some tools to make sure you're on the right track to to respond to their criteria you write your proposal to nih um it's also more focused of course on the business aspect so i'm making sure you've you've thought about what the commercial opportunity is definitely by phase two that you can you can speak to that and that you have a strong team that can um that can achieve all the aims that you've proposed and that's that's probably similar to other types of nih grants but usually you want to have someone that's on the industry side of things too that can help to to focus on that aspect someone asked what help is available with drafting patents so that's generally something that's outside of the asbtc and likely other sbdc's areas of service but you can often work really you can try your your law school at your local university and see what kind of services they offer it's probably not going to be that in depth but they can maybe help you with some more of the preliminary aspects of considering what to include in a patent but i would say also check out your your arkansas bar association if you're in this state because they actually identify attorneys by areas of expertise so if you need someone with specialized knowledge and biology for example they can help you um really make sure that you're including the right language and your claims and things like that you're probably gonna have to pay ultimately pay a patent attorney with that process but there are some early stage things you can do maybe with lower cost resources to get started someone asked if i could elaborate on the limit of the three aedc funds um let me see if i can get back to that slide so i talked about maybe it's the first three the t tag is the um the five thousand dollar cost match so how that works is the adc provides 37.50 match and then the company needs to put in 1250 with that you add up to 5 000 total all that money goes to the resource provider that the company has decided to engage for assistance preparing their proposal so you do need to either have that match available from your own company or through an in-kind provider that can help pay it for you the technology development program this is something that's it's up to a hundred thousand dollars in royalty-based financing usually i see these awards more like fifty thousand dollars total that's really for anything that's that's advancing your uh research from the lab to the the market so it's pretty broad um what what all can be funded abc really likes to see that you're trying to grow new high-tech high-paid jobs in the state of arkansas so sometimes clients of mine won't necessarily be a fit for sbr but they're still a fit for this program they're just moving too fast for sbr which usually takes between you know three to five years so this can be a good program option for them c capital investment program that's a 500 000 royalty capital so it's it's seed capital essentially as it sounds like uh where um the terms are a little bit different for that been technology development program and it's stretched out over a period of years as well hopefully that helps i'm definitely happy to connect you with the point of contact for adc on these programs to give you some more information and maybe find out which program you should start with based on where you're at in developing your your new technology someone's asked can college professors apply for these funds um definitely um you do need to have a business um so either you could be a university sub award that's working in collaboration with a business or you would you would start the business as well and just um connect with your department to see what the what the allowances are in terms of your employment agreement how you can still serve in your current position and also for this company if you want to serve in the role of the principal investigator there are some considerations like how can you be full-time for the company um but also keep your role at the university so that's something you usually have to negotiate with your employer on how it can work but definitely there's not a restriction on on you applying just based on the fact that you have a position as a college professor someone's asked when determining the percent contribution by the pi which is the at least 51 effort or universities is this measured by budget or some other metric so so the percent contribute so i guess just uh to make sure i'm clearing about two different separate issues the pi does need to be at least 51 percent employed by the company if it's sbir program uh and then when they in terms of amount effort that you're actually putting into the project that that is something that the the budget can can measure you know how many hours how does that convert to part of the budget um but you do track your hours so it's kind of a combination of both of those things that you're um so for example um nih might say you have to put at least 10 percent effort onto the project and so you would say how many months you're going to perform and how many hours for that month because it's not it's not just a 40 hour a week gig um so you just need to be clear about that you can explain how much you're putting in and how that translates into hours and dollars that are part of the budget someone asked you mentioned that phase zero funding from abc what's the eligibility criteria is it before a phase one award so yes usually it is before phase one award um eligibility is pretty broad it's you do need to be set up as a company in the state of arkansas you need to have identified a resource provider and guiding their got their agreement to work with you conditional fund tag award if you don't know of any providers i'd be happy to connect you with a few options but really anyone can serve as your provider they just need to fill out an application for the adc as the as a third-party research provider someone asked does someone need to be available for instructing a startup does someone need to be available for instructing start a startup i'm not sure what that's asking exactly uh but i mean you don't you you can start a company pretty readily if you just go to the arkansas secretary of state office website there's a step i would say to search for disney business entity name to see if the name you have in mind for your company is already taken or not that would be one of the first steps then deciding which type of entity you think is best for you at this time you can always change it later a lot of my clients are formed as llc's so that that could be something to consider there's not really any any one entity that's going to be more likely to get you funding through this program as long as you are a for-profit company that's really all that matters at this stage but i would be happy to help you learn about what the different entity options are benefits and cons of those and then get you to the main things to know about when you get to the secretary of state website where do you go from there to to complete the registration i'll be happy to help with that someone asked is sttr funding available from nih and yes they are one of the larger agencies so they do have both sbr and str programs another person asks once a grant or contract has been awarded are there any penalties for lack of further success this could be maybe failure to commercialize or lack of expected progress in research so there's not any penalty per say that the money like like the shelby from the video said it's essentially free money so the government just takes a loss if they don't see the impact of their of their money materialize in the commercial world um that being said i mean the penalty is that if you want to apply in the future especially from the same agency that's going to be something that they have in their in their records that they did fund you before and you weren't able to move forward for whatever reason but yeah you don't have to pay the money back or anything like that a lot of times it's just that's just part of the part of how things go um that the agencies understand that things don't always go to plan usually you have alternative strategy if things don't work out what would be your plan b so so you've had at least two ways to think about how you can structure your project in case the first way is a failure so so really what you can do is always just move on to the next idea that you have and go from there and that way it really shouldn't slow you down it's just that you you figured out oh this isn't this isn't the way for me after all this technology isn't isn't proving the concept so that's that's a good sign you don't need to move forward so even when you technically fail it's still not not really a failure because that's what phase one is all about just testing the concept does it work is it feasible if it's not then switch to the next idea that you have and look at some opportunities for that one our next one asks could you comment on the characteristics of applications that win an award which characteristics do the reviewers tend to find the most important that's a really good question um applications that are that are funded usually have a few things that are very strong which would be the the team the especially the principal investigator needs to be someone that really shines on the paper as something that's that's very knowledgeable in the field well qualified to oversee the project effort and um and has a passion for the for the work oftentimes there's areas where you can talk about why you're interested in this what's your personal personal statement and so there's a place where you can talk about why is this something that particularly speaks to you of course the team's important but also the work plan i would say that's even more critical a lot of times they really want to see that you thought out what are all the task level things that need to be done to be successful in answering your research questions or objectives so things that you thought about where the work will be done who will do it how will they do it what approach will be used why are they doing it it's all the things like who what where when and why that's really detailed out for them so it's very clear that you've thought about all the things that go into conducting this research work usually at phase one they're funding your strategy more so than the technology itself that you've got a strong plan in place because it is a long-term approach so once you have if you at least have a strong foundation for the work then you have a better chance of being successful in the long run so they're really looking very closely at your work plan section um that being said some agencies still like to see even in phase one that you've been thinking about commercial opportunity for example the national science foundation is very big on that so that's where i get a lot of interest in our market research to to really quantify the market opportunity uh look at the trends and the customers and show that this is something that's still going to be a viable market three to four years down there down the road when you actually do reach them if it's still going to be a viable opportunity for them hopefully that helps answer answer that question um more questions about yes you will have a copy of the recording and the slides i know that was kind of um a lot at the end about their the spiral week in the south any questions about that please let me know that as well i'd be happy to help you get ready for that november opportunity all right looks like all the questions we have so i'll go back to my contact slide if you have anything that you think about later um just feel free to call or email me and i'll be happy to talk with you about that thank you all again for joining me this morning i hope you have a wonderful day and look forward to working with you thanks so much