The Small Business Innovation Research program, created in 1982, now allocates 2.5% of 11 federal agencies' external R&D budgets to fund R&D projects by small businesses to meet mission needs and commercialize the results of federally funded research. The program now makes awards of over $2.3 billion annually. Despite the size and longevity of the program, it had never benefitted from a comprehensive review until now.To provide such an assessment, the Congress asked the National Academies to conduct a "comprehensive study of how the SBIR program has stimulated technological innovation and used small businesses to meet federal research and development needs" and make recommendations an potential improvements to the program. To meet this mandate, the NRC Committee charged with this study commissioned extensive original research on the operation, challenges, and achievements of the SBIR program.This report was requested by the Department of Defense (DoD) to review the SBIR Fast Track program currently in operation at DoD, following up on the Academies' earlier analysis of the program, completed in 2000. This report is a supplemental analysis to a series of assessments of the overall SBIR program operations at the five leading R&D agencies representing some 96 percent of program expenditure, including the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation, as well as an additional report that provides a comprehensive overview of the program.Related Work From the National AcademiesSBIR and the Phase III Challenge of CommercializationCommercialization of successful SBIR awards is a key challenge for the program and represents an essential step in the program's contribution to government missions. To better understand the challenges inherent in the conversion of promising research to useful products and processes, the National Research Council convened a conference focused on the commercialization of SBIR-funded innovations at the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). A unique feature of the conference is that it brought together, for the first time, the program managers, small business leaders, and prime contractor personnel involved in commercializing the results of SBIR awards through procurement at DoD and NASA. These participants identified the challenges and highlighted existing and evolving best practices among successful cases in the third (or commercialization) phase of the SBIR program. The conference, captured in this report, contributed significantly to a better understanding of the obstacles and opportunities in this phase of the SBIR program and directly to legislation designed to address these challenges.SBIR: Program Diversity and Assessment ChallengesThis report captures the first conference convened as part of the National Research Council's assessment of the Small Business Innovation Research program. The conference brought together agency officials, academic experts, Congressional staff, technologists, R&D managers, and venture capitalists to discuss the challenges of early-stage technology development and the role of the SBIR program. At the same time, the conference provided a forum for agencies to describe how the program meets the specific needs and objectives of the diverse agency missions. This report represents the first effort to document the flexibility and diversity of the program across the multiple federal agencies with large SBIR programs. As such, it forms a valuable baseline to the National Research Council's assessment of the SBIR program's operations, achievements, and challenges.