Welcome to The Innovation Lab SBIR Innovation Lab

National Cancer Institute’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Development Center Director Michael Weingarten and Program Director Monique Pond introduce the Innovation Lab podcast series and provide insight into the benefits the program can provide biotech innovators with no strings attached.
TRANSCRIPT:
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MONIQUE:     Hello and welcome to Innovation Lab, your go to resource for all things biotech startups, brought to you by the National Cancer Institute’s Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, Development Center. Our podcast hosts interviews with successful entrepreneurs and provides resources for small businesses looking to take their cutting-edge cancer solutions from lab to market. I’m Monique Pond, a program director and team leader at the NCI SBIR and today's host.
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The Small Business Innovation Research is a congressionally mandated funding program designed to propel technological innovation across the United States. Here at the National Cancer Institute, the SBIR Development Center is the institute's engine of innovation and the hub of small business funding. Today, as we kick off our first podcast series, I would like to introduce our program and walk you through some of the topics that we plan to cover in our upcoming series.
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For our very first episode, I've invited one of our co-hosts and the Director of the NCI SBIR Development Center, Michael Weingarten. Hello, Michael.
MICHAEL:     Hi Monique, how are you?
MONIQUE:     Doing well today, thanks for joining us. Appreciate your time.
MICHAEL:     Yeah. Happy to be a part of this and really excited that we're launching our own podcast.
MONIQUE:     Great. So Michael, you started the SBIR Development Center back in 2006. Can you tell me how that came about?
MICHAEL: I was actually hired back in 2005 by the director then, Dr. John Niederhuber. And Dr. Niederhuber was really interested in taking a new look at how we could manage the SBIR program at the  NCI. He was interested in bringing a strategic focus to this program. So he came to me and he asked me to come up with a range of different ideas for how we can improve the program overall and improve the impact of this program.
So we took a fresh look at the SBIR program and I came back with a set of recommendations, really that were based on looking at some of the best practices from across the government and some of the top agencies running SBIR programs, as well as just some ideas that we came up ourselves with. And probably the most important recommendation that we had was that we actually set up a center at the NCI, that we could run this program where individuals could actually spend 100% of their time just with small businesses and just managing SBIR's.
For the program and for our companies to be successful, we really did need program directors working at the NCI who had industry experience as well as some prior track record and experience with the commercialization of technologies. But we need people spending 100% of their time working with companies and guiding them and advising them, and that's what we're able to do with the SBIR program now that we've set up a center.
We have a team of about 22 people now and we're able to offer just a range of resources and assistance to companies who really need our help.
MONIQUE:     So, Michael, tell me, what does the typical small business coming into the program look like?
MICHAEL:     Well, when companies first apply for NCI SBIR funding, they're usually startups and fairly small. So I would say the typical company that approaches us first for funding maybe has two or three people when they first get started. A lot of times they’re a spin out from a university or a recent startup and they don't have a lot of experience in working with the NIH.
So typically, you know, they're -- We like to spend a lot of time with companies really educating them about how the NCI SBIR program wo