33 



OPENING STATEMENT 

 OF CHAIRMAN PETER G. TORKILDSEN 



HEARING ON THE SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION RESEARCH 



PROGRAM 



Thursday, April 6, 1995 

 10 a.m. 



The Committee will come to order. 



This hearing marks the last in a series of hearings reviewing the Small 

 Business Administration's programs. It is appropriate that the last of these 

 hearings should be on the most forward-looking of its programs, the Small 

 Business Innovation Research Program. 



As we look toward the future of small business we must necessarily 

 include high technology; it is in this sector that some of the highest paying 

 jobs are created. It is from this sector that most of the greatest growth will 

 come. Technology-oriented small businesses are a fertile ground for 

 innovation, but suffer under a number of constraints. Access to capital is 

 the most obvious problem, and it is one that we have addressed in other 

 hearings of the full Committee. But the more challenging issue, and the 

 one which the SBIR program attempts to address, is this: how do we take 

 the tremendous creativity and flexibility of the small company and give it a 

 forum where the innovative technologies these companies develop can be 

 utilized by the government and the commercial marketplace? We've heard 

 all the stories of the commercialization of technologies developed for the 

 Space Program or the National Institutes for Health yielding tremendous 

 benefits for the consumer and the companies that have commercialized 

 them. Shouldn't small companies have a similar opportunity? 



The Small Business Innovation Research Program was created to help 

 answer that question. SBIR challenges agencies and departments that have 

 massive extramural research budgets - in excess of $100 million - to take a 

 nominal percentage of those funds and set them aside for small business 

 which competes for research projects at two levels; the feasibility study 



