Abstract

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is the oldest and largest (in terms of public sector financial support) Institute within the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). To date, the research that the NCI sponsors in small firms has yet to be systematically studied. Using survey data collected by the National Research Council (NRC) within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine from a random sample of Phase II research projects funded through the NCI’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, multiple dimensions of the economic and social outputs from those projects are considered in a descriptive manner. The outputs considered in this monograph relate to the legislated purposes of the SBIR program, namely to increase private sector commercialization of innovations derived from Federal research and development and to stimulate technological innovation.

Small Firm Research Supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute

Small Firm Research Supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute focuses on and describes dimensions of research and innovative behavior in a unique sample of small firms publicly funded through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and discusses the policy implications from the descriptive findings. Section 2 briefly overviews the history of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its oldest Institute, the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Section 3 offers a roadmap for the study of small firm research funded through the NCI’s SBIR program. Section 4 describes the data used to explore dimensions of small firm SBIR funded research. The findings from the empirical analysis of the data described in Section 4 that are related to the commercialization of NCI-funded new technologies are presented in Section 5.

The findings from the empirical analysis of the data described in Section 4 that are related to the outflow of technical knowledge through technology transfer metrics from NCI-funded new technologies are described in Section 6. Technology relationships are the focus of Section 7. Section 8 explores the dimensions of funded firms that responded on the NRC survey that they would have pursued their Phase II project in the absence of SBIR funding. Section 9 considers the social impact of the NCI as quantified through the producer surplus and consumer surplus generated from the sale of NCI funded research projects. Section 10 concludes with a discussion of the findings from the analyses related to the NCI’s support of small firm research and offers a call for future studies that address this topic from the perspective of other NIH Institutes and Centers and from the perspective of U.S. research agencies in general.