A study of commercialization factors in a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funded company

A nation's ability to innovate is paramount for its success and survival among other nations. But capitalizing on these innovations and bringing them to the marketplace are what gives a nation its competitive edge and provide sustainable growth over time in this highly dynamic global economy. In the United States' complex innovation ecosystem, small businesses and entrepreneurs play a crucial role in innovating new technologies and commercializing them. Indeed many of the nation's large, successful and innovative firms started out as small entrepreneurial firms. Microsoft, Intel, AMD, FedEx, Qualcomm, Adobe are examples to these firms. These small entrepreneurial firms with new ideas need to garner fair amount of funding before they can bring their ideas into the marketplace. However for entrepreneurial companies with science based innovative ideas, due to the unproven nature of these ideas and the lack of sufficient public information, there exist knowledge asymmetries. Therefore possibility of getting direct venture capital and/or angel investment becomes very slim for these firms unless the idea's commercial potential is obviously clear or a customer is already available. To address this early stage financing gap and to increase private sector commercialization of innovations, the Federal government offers funding through its three phase private-public partnership innovation program, called Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

Department dc:contributor.department

System Design and Management Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Ustun, Teoman Emre, 1976-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Maria C. Yang.

• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55247

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/55247