SBIR small-business research mandate (10% federal R&D set-aside, ~1990–present)

Tom frames SBIR as the institutional backdrop for Belmar's NSF-supported startup. Notes Congressional finding that new jobs come from small companies, hence the 10% set-aside.

Tom: It was actually about twenty-five or thirty years ago that some people in Washington did studies and found that all the new jobs were created in small companies. There's a good reason for that, we can talk about why. But Congress said, we're going to take 10% of all the research money that we give away and put it in small business innovation research, SBIR. They've been doing it for twenty-five years and they've seen thousands of startup companies, some succeed or fail. And the National Science Foundation, which is a big surprise to me when someone explained it to me, has a course they force you — if you get a grant, you must take this week-long course. So he's going to give you the abbreviated version of that week-long NSF course, which is based on billions of dollars' worth of research in startup companies and what they've learned for twenty-five years.