Commercialization Plan Series 2/2: Further aspects to consider when writing an SBIR Commercialization Plan
May 30, 2021
By ScienceDocs NIH SBIR grant writer and SBIR Commercialization Plan Expert Dr. Samuel
In the last blog, I briefly introduced the SBIR Commercialization Plan. The commercialization plan in your SBIR proposal answers the following big question: ‘How would you leverage your company’s assets to discover and validate a repeatable, and scalable business model with your envisioned technology?’
As you craft your SBIR Commercialization Plan (CP), each section of the CP should answer the above question. Measuring how well each section uniquely answers this question is an excellent way to prepare a comprehensive CP. Let’s discuss a few examples.
One of the first sections of the CP is ‘Technology, and Technology Outcomes and Impact’. In this section, you will describe your envisioned technology (say tech-A) and how it is going to impact the world with its innovation. After describing the technical aspects of the technology, you should provide material to answer the following questions:
- What is the ‘pain’ or ‘need’ of customers tech-A is going to resolve?
- What technology or service (say tech-B) your potential customers are currently using to solve the problem your envisioned technology solves in a better way?
- How much are these potential customers paying for tech-B?
- What is the number of these potential customers?
- How is tech-A better than tech-B?
- What are other possible competing technologies for tech-A?
Although some of these questions overlap with questions you will also answer in other sections of the CP. It is important to remember that that overlap is ok, and reviewers do not mind reading any content repeatedly that answers the big question.
Here is another section of the CP as an example; the ‘Market characteristics and entry strategy’ section. In this section, you will answer the above five questions again in addition to the following questions:
- What type of market will your product or service enter? A new market, segmented market, or another market type?
- What are the direct and indirect costs related to building your product or service at scale?
- Can your targeted market bear the cost of your product or service, while your company can still have enough gross margins to be financially healthy and attractive for future private investment?
- Are there any regulations regarding the sale of your product or service?
- If there are any regulations, what is your strategy to get approvals from regulatory bodies?
- What will be the likely adoption rate of your product by your potential customers? Adoption rate is basically how quickly your customers will adopt your product or service as compared to alternatives in the open market
- How would your team validate the envisioned product or service sales? Would you perform any pilot marketing and sales work?
- How will you market your product or service and create sales?
You can see that all these questions help you answer critical information for your venture’s long-term growth. These lists of questions are not complete, as there could be other questions that are specifically unique to your venture that you will have to address. The SBIR Commercialization Plan is like an exciting game plan, enabling you and your investors to navigate your venture across all the challenges of making your idea a commercial success. I use the word ‘exciting’ as it should excite reviewers of your SBIR proposal so that they conclude that your technology fulfills a critical need of your customers who cannot wait to try it out!
Let us help you with YOUR SBIR Commercialization Plan. Send us a quote request HERE.
Did you miss Post #1 in this SBIR Commercialization Plan series?
Learn more about SBIR Commercialization Plan Expert and NIH SBIR Grant Writer Dr. Samuel
