Capital is the fuel that drives the innovation ecosystem. Grants can make up an important component in funding and catalyzing innovation. The biggest source of grants is of course the US government through numerous agencies and programs. Today we talk with Elizabeth (Ela) Mirowski a Program Director for the SBIR/STTR program at the National Science Foundation.

You can listen to this and all the Austin Next Podcasts at: https://www.austinnextpodcast.com/32

Grants and other nondilutive funding are key for…What’s next Austin?

Highlights from today’s episode:

The NSF deploys a lot of capital to research institutions and early-stage companies

· 25% of all basic research in the US is supported by NSF Grants

· $8.5 billion budget deployed across 11,000 projects and 1,800 intuitions involving over 300,000 individuals

· America’s Seed Fund (new home of SBIR STTR programs) awards about $200 million per year in R&D funding to start-ups and small businesses. — (https://seedfund.nsf.gov/)

· Greater than 50% of phase 1 proposals in FY20 went to first time applicants

· 95% of Phase I awards in FY20 were awarded to startups with less than 10 employees

They are also introducing new programs and evolving process

· The iCore program that is training scientific team individuals and helping them translate their technology (what is the difference between features, benefits, and value propositions)

· The Convergence accelerator that supports merging technologies across sectors

· Pathways to Enable Open Source Ecosystems (POES), whose goal is to fund new open source ecosystems

We discussed a bit the great stagnation theory that we covered in our interview with Jason Crawford Episode (https://www.austinnextpodcast.com/research-speaks-progress-studies-with-jason-crawford-founder-and-ceo-of-the-roots-of-progress/)

NSF wanted to tap into the excitement of SXSW and felt it was an important platform to announce some of their new initiatives like the Technology Innovation Partnerships (TIP) directorate

About Austin Next: Austin continues transforming into the next innovation powerhouse. In this podcast, we explore how Central Texas is growing…The people and companies, the industries and infrastructure, the macro and micro trends that come together to create the future of Austin.

We want to answer one basic question… What’s next Austin?

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