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Why Is The SBIR Program Worth Funding

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Why the SBIR Program is Worth Funding
Conservative economists often criticize government involvement in private markets, arguing that at best it is inefficient at best and at worst is counterproductive. However, even the great conservative economist Milton Friedman often pointed out that government intervention is necessary when markets fail to allocate resources efficiently.
Even conservative economists should support the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program – a scheme in which eleven Federal agencies with external research and development (R&D) budgets of more than $100 million must allocate 2.8 of those budgets to grants or contracts to small businesses undertaking projects that both have commercial potential and meet the R&D goals of the funding agency. The SBIR program overcomes failure of private markets to fund innovation when the benefit to society exceeds the benefits to the private firms undertaking it. By overcoming this market failure, the SBIR program makes all of us better off by facilitating the allocation of resources to the development of new materials, medical technologies, …show more content…

New and small firms conduct much of the breakthrough innovation that generates technology that benefits society greatly because the incentive of ownership is generally necessary to get people to put in the effort and take the risks necessary to develop fundamentally new ideas. But private capital markets often fail to provide sufficient financing to the new and young companies trying to develop early stage technologies because venture capitalists and business angles find it difficult to assess their potential returns and the time horizon necessary to produce those returns. As a result, new and young firms often fail to obtain the capital they need to undertake early stage innovations, leading to less innovation to than what society

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