Maximizing Your SBIR Grant Success: A Guide to Defining Roles and Responsibilities in Your Project!
In this instructional segment, Stacy Chin explains that reviewers assess whether the principal investigator (PI) has access to the necessary resources and expertise to execute the proposed R&D. Consequently, the PI must clearly identify who will perform each task and where experiments will be conducted within an SBIR project. This clarity becomes especially critical in Phase II applications, where startup teams are larger and often collaborate with external parties to commercialize the innovation. Chin advises applicants to add explicit role and responsibility statements to each senior key personnel’s biosketch and to summarize these assignments in the technical narrative after each proposed experiment. For early‑stage startups with limited internal capacity, hiring outside consultants or third‑party providers is a viable strategy to fill expertise gaps.
