Click here to access the Academy.

Long ago, my family and I had a four string quartet that played concerts at senior citizen homes throughout Northern Virginia. In December 2012 or 2013 (my memory isn't fully clear on the exact year), we played at the Sun Rise Senior Living facility near Leesburg, Virginia. Sitting in the back of the room was Mr. Roland Tibbetts, founder of the SBIR Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

I was in awe. In 2007, I became the first African American SBIR Tibbetts Award Winner. In between sets, I sat with Mr. Tibbetts to thank him for his work, and also brag a little about winning the award named after him. Mr. Tibbetts response, shocked me. He simply responded, "so what?" Perplexed, I said, "I don't understand." To which he replied, "What are you doing to give back to the community?"

That brief conversation set me on a journey that included writing a book with my good friend Mike Lisagor, which was published on Amazon in 2015. Unfortunately, I never got to let Mr. Tibbetts know that I had followed through because he passed away in 2014.

Recognizing that we all have a limited number of revolutions around the sun, I began teaching, evangelizing, and doing what I could to give back to the SBIR community that has been so good to me and my family.

As such, this Knowledge Academy is my Opus. The Academy represents the sum total of everything I know about SBIRs since my first Phase I award back in 1992(ish). The Academy will be a living resource, and together, we can continue building on its foundation. For example, the Academy includes information not in my original book, which looking back, had a lot of flaws. The Academy includes a Large Language Model (LLM) Bot called Maven, that can answer your SBIR related questions. Maven is trained on every bit of information we could find on the SBIR program, and also the FAR. Click here to see the Maven LLM Bot in action. Maven derives from one of our SBIRs.

Beginning in 2024, legislative, policy, and other important program updates also will be posted in the Academy. We encourage everyone to notify us of important updates so we can share with the entire community.

A good place to start is the SBIR/STTR Primer. The Primer provides a high-level overview on SBIR/STTR. The audience that can benefit from the Primer is a small business looking for broad strokes SBIR/STTR on everything from Phase I through Phase III.

Below is the structure of the Knowledge Academy. It's free to use, but we hope that you will contribute content that I may have missed, notify me of mistakes, give back to the community by sharing the Academy with anyone interested in the SBIR and STTR programs.

The SBIR Academy is also integrated with Generative AI (GAI) technology to respond to your questions about the SBIR program. Access it by tapping on the purple button on the bottom right of your screen.

I hope you enjoy the Academy, and good luck.

Eric Adolphe

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