10 Tips For Winning Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Proposals

In the 27 years Bevilacqua Research Corporation has been in business I must have written over 100 SBIR proposals. I have won 16 (1 was never funded) and have gone to Phase II on 7 and Phase III on five. This may not seem like much but as competitive as the SBIR program is, this is a pretty good record. In fact the DOD Techlink office has written an article on our success that will be published as soon as the DOD public affairs office approves it. Although we are not considered a SBIR company (i.e. a small business that makes its living from responding to and winning SBIR’s) I conservatively estimate that ¾ of all of the revenue that we have made since we opened our doors in 1992 are a direct result of our participation in the SBIR program.  When I mentor small businesses I always give them a free SBIR proposal template and the following advice: Continue reading “10 Tips For Winning Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Proposals”

Testing Artificially Intelligent Systems…. Not just possible…Easy!

A senior manager in our test group down at Eglin Air Force Base forwarded me a white paper by SOGETI a company in Europe. The white paper was titled, “Testing of Artificial Intelligence, AI Quality Engineering Skills – An Introduction”. In general the white paper was well done however the authors based their conclusion that AI testers will need a plethora of new skills to be able to test AI on the following statement, “AI is not required to learn, it could be using pre-programmed rules to handle all possible outcomes. However, for systems with more than basic complexity, this has proved to be a task too large and too complex to handle (it has been tried and failed multiple times since the 1960s)”. What these authors apparently didn’t now is that BRC did solve this problem in 1996 under the Army’s small business innovation research (SBIR) program. In 1998 BRC was awarded the Tibbetts award from the small business administration for “excellence in innovation” for this breakthrough. Continue reading “Testing Artificially Intelligent Systems…. Not just possible…Easy!”

The Real Effect of The Government Shutdown on Small Businesses and Their Employees

People often are surprised to hear that I rarely (if ever) watch TV “news” channels. (In fact I rarely watch TV at all-I prefer to do my own thinking!). I am from the Walter Cronkite generation where news organizations were trusted and were believed to be the defenders of the truth (and therefore ultimately our freedom) in America. What I see today is that neither side of the liberal-conservative split in this country gets the truth from any news organization. Rather both sides get talking points designed solely to discredit the other side at the expense of the truth. Continue reading “The Real Effect of The Government Shutdown on Small Businesses and Their Employees”