2023 America's Seed Fund Week Agency Reverse Pitch: DHS

You. Hello, My name is Bob Renner. I am the Small Business Innovation Research Program Outreach Manager for the Department of Homeland Security. I'm here to talk to you about the DHS SBIR program and DHS. DHS was celebrating its 20th anniversary on this first slide. We work with these operational components. So first a little bit about dhs. As you may know, the Department of Homeland Security was formed as a direct result of 911 terrorist attacks to ensure that the United States would be better prepared to identify, prevent and if needed, respond to any such future threats against the people and critical infrastructure of our nation. Charged with preventing terrorism and enhancing security Securing and managing our borders Enforcing and administering our immigration laws Safeguarding and securing cyberspace Ensuring resilience to disasters. We work with these operational components to write our topics seeking innovative ideas that meet homeland security research and development technology needs. We go out once a year with these topics in a solicitation. Small businesses write proposals. We evaluate the proposals. Then we go to award phase one contracts. Our phase one contracts are typically valued at $150,000 for a five month period of performance. Additionally, we allow $6,500 to be requested for our technical and business assistance, also known as Taba. We generally award one to three topics or one to three awards per topic. We go out with about eight to 12 topics per year. When we at the end of our phase one topics we down select to one of those, one to two of those Phase one to a Phase two. We invite all Phase one awardees to submit a proposal. Our Phase twos are valued at 1 million up to $1 million for 24 month period of performance. And and we do allow up to $50,000 to be proposed for the technical and business assistance again but that is inclusive of the $101 million. Our annual solicitation timeline is as follows. Our pre solicitation opens in November. Our full solicitation opens in December and closes in January. We tend to make our awards Phase one contract awards in April or selections in April and awards in May. Some additional opportunities to work with DHS is our Phase Ones. We do invite all of our Phase Ones to apply for our I Corps as well as we invite all of our phase two awardees to participate in our commercialization and assistance program. These are opportunities for phase two awardees to learn strategies to get to successful commercialization. Our commercialization readiness pilot program is more of an internal pool where our topic managers say hey, we're really close with a topic and want to maybe proceed a little bit further to get the the company just a little bit closer to commercialization. We also leverage other agencies technologies and we do that as an internal pool as well. Looking at other agencies technologies and seeing how we could maybe pull them into something we have a need for and align it to that. Some of the topic areas of interest you may see in our topics, in our topic calls or in our solicitations are listed on on this slide. And here we have some other additional resources. We have our Deconstructing SBIR webinar series. I highly urge you to take a look at those as they will go into more detail on the SBIR program and processes. Here within dhs, we generally do an annual deconstructing the solicitation for that particular year right or around the November December timeframe. Also visit our website and review some of our success stories. We also have a new partnership guide out that I urge you to take a look at. This is some other opportunities. It's an opportunity for you to understand DHS research, development, test and evaluation priorities and some other pathways to work with science and technology here at dhs. As always, we urge you to ask us any questions by sending an email to our DHS SBIR office. This is a monitored email. You will get a response within a day or two as well. Join our mailing list. We promise not to spam you, but we do provide important information program updates as well and I thank you very much for the opportunity and for watching the video.