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Finding the Innovators: Recipients of Healthcare-Related SBIR Awards

The SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) program is a federal initiative that provides funding for small businesses to engage in research and development. Tracking SBIR awardees, I believe, should be a great method for identifying entrepreneurial, innovation-oriented players within the Texas economy. I decided to identify which Texas-based companies in the healthcare/biomedical industry have received SBIR awards in the recent past, and how much funding they have obtained. The SBIR website contains a well-curated database of all current and past awardees (for visualizing national trends, be sure to check out their amazing "Graphical Tools" page). I pulled up a list of all SBIR awards given to Texas-based companies between 2008 and 2012 that were sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services – thus limiting the search results to grants awarded to companies in the healthcare/biomedical industry. The list consisted of 186 grants awarded to 85 different companies; you can download the entire list as an Excel file here.

Here are the top ten awardees as measured by total SBIR funds obtained:



 As can be seen, the SBIR program can be a significant source of cash for the top awardees. A handful of companies have been extremely successful in obtaining multiple awards. 

Next, I manually assigned each company based on location to one of six metropolitan areas within Texas - Austin, Bryan/College Station, Dallas/Fort Worth, El Paso, Houston, or San Antonio. Shown below is how healthcare-related SBIR awards in Texas are geographically distributed:


By all measures – whether by number of awardees, total number of grants, or total dollar amount – Houston comes out on top in terms of capturing healthcare-related SBIR funding. 

Below is an interactive map (courtesy of http://batchgeo.com) showing all 85 Texas companies that received HHS-sponsored SBIR grants between 2008 and 2012:  

(view TX SBIR 2008-2012 consolidated company list in a full screen map)


There are many ways to slice and dice the data available at www.sbir.gov, and I plan to post several more stories on this topic going forward. Is there any particular kind of analysis you'd like to see? Leave a comment, or contact me at isamuhartman@gmail.com, and let me know. 
- Isamu Hartman, PhD

Comments

  1. Khanh HoApril 7, 2013 at 8:05 AM

    Such incredibly useful data. I like the way you lay things out so crystal clear and in such no-nonsense language. I hope you keep up this level of blogging. I'm definitely going to bookmark this!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Isamu HartmanApril 8, 2013 at 4:00 AM

      Thank you Khanh! You should know that your advice and example have been instrumental.

      Delete
  2. Tamar ReynoldsApril 7, 2013 at 8:20 AM

    Forgive this comment as I am not in the industry, but do you think that Houston ranks out on top due to the fact that Houston not only has a higher population density in Texas than Dallas, but that they are also more accommodating to businesses and certain industries in general? Also, while it's good that companies are getting grants for research, do you think the companies that get more of the grants are more worthy of them or just better at churning the grant requesting paperwork machinery? Just a question. I'd love to see even some of the smaller businesses that deserve grants get them....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Isamu HartmanApril 8, 2013 at 4:13 AM

      "[Do] you think the companies that get more of the grants are more worthy of them or just better at churning the grant requesting paperwork machinery?"

      Thanks for commenting! I'd say it's a matter of "and," not "or." From my own (relatively shallow) experience in the world of applying for federal funding, the intrinsic quality of the idea and perfection in paperwork both have to be in place.

      Delete
    2. Tamar ReynoldsApril 10, 2013 at 8:16 AM

      You are correct in both regards when it comes to federal funding (bureaucrats do love their mounds of paperwork and filing), but I think that grants should always be given for biomedical, genetic, pharmaceutical, and environmental research. I'm not so keen on research grants that are often given for (what seems to me) trivial or questionable research or for feasibility studies. Just my opinion.

      Delete
  3. Anita Myer ChandlerSeptember 20, 2013 at 6:48 AM

    Very interesting. Could you break down by field, such as regenerative medicine, next-generation sequencing, etc?

    ReplyDelete

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