The seemingly obvious but often overlooked point is that there is no path to a military contract that doesn’t require a military customer to use their own money…
The dirty little secret in military innovation circles is that MANY military personnel regard the SBIR/STTR program as “free money”. This isn’t an entirely inaccurate belief, in that all SBIR programs have some kind of funding support possible to Phase 1 and/or Phase 2 contracts, but the whole point of the program is to get to Phase 3 where it’s all on the customer to fund everything. Rather the customer went any number of other contracting routes to acquire the product or service, or chose to use a SBIR/STTR contract, it all ends the same way with a military customer funding the purchase. The hot potato game of trying to make some other military organization pay for your military organization’s wants or needs, can be the most frustrating and opaque game that many defense businesses end up suffering through.
Honestly it is difficult to even recommend going the SBIR/STTR route to a contract if you can’t get the military customer to commit funding in any phase up front. Not every military organization (few in fact) have the RDT&E funding type required to even contribute to Phases 1or 2, but everyone has access to either O&M or Procurement funding of some amount (depending on the contract need) required for Phase 3 purchases. The willingness of your military customer to give you some kind of written commitment to whatever level of funding they can tells you everything you need to know about the situation. In short if they can’t or won’t commit funds to any level, you really need to be honest with yourself about the chances of them funding anything at any point. Is it worth it to pursue a SBIR/STTR with them? Should you look for another customer who is willing to commit funds? If you have a customer willing to commit funds, is SBIR/STTR really your best option for a sole source contract?
There are many questions whose answers should all go into your calculus as a business on both the reality of the actual business opportunity, as well as which path to the business opportunity you should take. With funding all things are possible...without it...well you get the point.
