One of the most detrimental misinterpretations of the SBIR proposal preparation process is that all an applicant needs are a good idea. Many applicants underestimate the importance of a capable team. A major component of the SBIR review process is evaluating the team’s capability.
#1 Understand the importance of your team
Start planning your team early in the grant application process and ensure they demonstrate relevant experience and expertise. Your team member’s resumes should prove to reviewers that the research team has the ability to do the work based on relevant past experience and training. Be sure to choose team members with impressive resumes to bolster the strength of your team. Be sure to work with team members to present the best of their experience in their biosketch as it relates to the specific activities in your SBIR project.
#2 Assign roles
To ensure success, our team needs clients to get their team grant-ready and set themselves up for success. This means all members of the team need to understand the process and their role within it. They must be assigned roles, tasks, and deliverables. These must be accompanied by a deadline, and the leader of the team must ensure the team is accountable for the tasks and deliverables they have been assigned.
#3 Assign a point person
One method we have found to facilitate this process is to assign a “point person” for each component. Perhaps one team member is responsible for providing information on the experimental design and activities, while another is responsible for signing off on the final draft after iterative review and copy editing. Still, other team members may have smaller deliverables, such as providing resumes, bio sketches, current and pending support, or collaboration and other affiliation information.
A team that is ready to work with us will have an organizational and leadership structure in place, team members ready to accept accountability and provide deliverables on time, and a working understanding of the expectations of the process, which are explained to each client during onboarding. If a team is not grant-ready, this can reduce the quality of their application or cause undue delays. For these reasons, we encourage all prospective clients to meet with their team ahead of proposal preparation to discuss expectations, task assignments, and standard operating procedures.
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We assist our clients in locating, applying for, and evaluating the outcomes of non-dilutive grant funding. We believe non-dilutive funding is a crucial tool for mitigating investment risks, and we are dedicated to guiding our clients through the entire process—from identifying the most suitable opportunities to submitting and managing grant applications.