The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, administered by the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), is celebrating two decades of delivering new ideas and leveraging new technologies to support the agency’s mission. In this guest post from director Dusty Lang, S&T offers a look at some of the program’s key successes to date and explains how planning is underway to build on them to reach more innovators than ever before.
At S&T, we look to small businesses to foster big ideas. S&T has administered the DHS SBIR program—the youngest of all SBIR programs across the federal government—since 2004, and after twenty years our numbers tell a story of both success and mission impact. To date, DHS SBIR has invested $415 million in 528 small businesses and supported 265 mission challenges (through individual topics) with 38 solicitations.
The long-standing SBIR program is the largest source of federal early-stage funding. It is a competitive, three-phase contract awards program intended to increase the participation of innovative and creative U.S. small businesses in federal research and development initiatives and to increase private sector commercialization of SBIR-funded solutions.
The objective is always to deliver the greatest value to the mission while helping to cultivate partnerships with small businesses. To that end, SBIR established the Other Agency Technology Solutions initiative in 2016, which leverages SBIR and Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I, Phase II or Phase III investments made by other agencies to fill agency capability gaps and requirement. This means, instead of reinventing the wheel, we leverage and cross-pollinate solutions designed with the help of other agencies to benefit DHS. It also helps breathe life into ideas that may have otherwise died on the vine elsewhere and ensure return on investment for the government.
One of the cornerstones of the DHS SBIR program is our commitment to, and focus on, commercialization. An issue facing many small businesses early on is the dreaded “valley of death,” facing resource constraints that risk not getting a technology or product off the ground. S&T meets our performers where they are, and we act as partners dedicated to helping support them through the process and help set them up for success. This commitment involves provision of a variety of resources, including first responder showcases that allow for marketing and visibility and programs like the Commercialization Assistance Marketplace that offer market research resources and other strategic assistance.
SBIR takes pride in the diversity and breadth of topics and mission areas supported. One of our many success stories is a technology developed as part of a 2014 cybersecurity solicitation, designed to assess software vulnerabilities and quickly identify solutions. This first-of-its-kind technology, designed to prioritize and manage application security risk, ended up being a commercial success internationally and has even been used within DHS. In 2019, it bested rival startups to win a $2 million “Shark Tank”-style venture capital contest run by a Maryland-based venture capital firm, and it has also gone on to win top homeland security awards.
Following is a sampling of additional SBIR success stories over the last two decades:
Explosive Chemical Alerting. Originally designed to assist U.S. troops in conflict zones, the Self-Tracking and Reconnaissance of Explosives (STARE) System detects small amounts of explosive materials concealed beneath clothing, hidden in backpacks or hand-carried baggage. Developed by a woman-owned small business, STARE is portable and significantly enhances contemporary security portals with the capability to scan unstructured crowds and automatically alerting threats in real-time when explosive materials are present. SBIR helped foster its development and enable it to be utilized by DHS and an expansive number of Department of Defense agencies.
Phone Scam Protection. SBIR funded an audio authentication technology that secures voice communications by verifying the identities of inbound callers in real-time and delivers high-level call security protection. The technology defends against “telephony denial of service” attacks that can otherwise render emergency call center lines unavailable by saturating them with bogus calls. Commercial success followed with deployments in a multitude of call centers, particularly in banking, insurance, benefits, telephone companies and government sectors.
Radiation Detection. The Optical Warning and Localization (OWL) radiation detection system that not only detects a potential radiation source, but it can assess whether it is an actual threat or non-threat while additionally providing a contextual assessment of the threat space, leveraging machine vision. OWL is now used by DHS and law enforcement nationwide and is leveraged as a core component of more than 50 larger radiological and nuclear detection systems.
Missing Persons Behavior Mapping. The Lost Person Behavior App is a mobile application that provides first responders with a missing person subject profile, tactical briefing, initial actions checklist, investigative questions, and statistics that help determine where to look. Leveraging the International Search and Rescue Incident Database and working with the U.S. Coast Guard and other groups on search theory, the technology was designed for scale. A subsequent SBIR project led to the development of the Search and Rescue Collection and Analysis Tool for use at the end of a search, which is currently in use by at least two states.
Our SBIR team recently held an event to coincide with the release or our annual pre-solicitation to promote this year’s initiatives and released five topics, encouraging small businesses to email the designated points of contact for each topic to ask technical questions and seek clarification. Launched in 2023, the DHS SBIR Phase 0 program allows for this type of event to coincide with release of the annual pre-solicitation to provide the community awareness and an opportunity to engage.
Moving forward, S&T will continue to publish SBIR solicitations and opportunities, while helping to cultivate small business partners through offerings like our Deconstructing SBIR webinar series, follow-on funding opportunities and SBIR showcases for our component partners to expand that scope of influence to different partners.
Visit S&T’s SBIR page for more information about how S&T works with small businesses.