Simco got its $25,000 and put in about that much more of its own. During the six months that the feasibility study lasted, the company continued its study of the growth, production, and seed characteristics of the tree. But the most important effects of the grant, says Mason, were a wider acceptance by serious scientists and the opportunity of coming up with a long-term research plan. "If it weren't for the NSF, we would not have been able to get the kind of brains working on this that we have," says Mason.
What the NSF gets out of the program is, of course, hard to measure, and figuring out what the nation's rewards are is even harder. Most of the products have yet to hit the market, though many of them sound promising, for instance a microcomputer that understands and answers questions in English rather than in computerese and a new process for making solar panels.And the charter recipients of Phase I and II grants, who received a total of $5.3 million from NSF, have attracted about $16 million in private funding.
But those rewards apparently haven't been enough. The NSF has reorganized itself several times during the four years of the SBIR program's existence, and after each reorganization, the percentage of money and manpower allotted to applied research has been smaller. Consequently, the SBIR budget, calculated as a percentage of the NSF's applied research funding, has not increased as rapidly as the program's supporters had hoped.
The effect has been not simply to distribute fewer resources to a smaller number of participants, but to shake the program's structure.Program managers and topic areas have been shuffled. Grants have been delayed by turnover and by uncertainties about loss of funding. Phase II money, which hadn't been awarded on schedule even before the major reorganizations, has been delayed for as long as 15 months.
The delay has slowed progress on some projects to a backwards crawl. Allocation of already scarce small-company resources has become very difficult when the fate of what in some cases is a significant portion of their efforts is unknown.
And the steady production of press releases by the NSF and other government agencies hasn't helped. News about projects went out when grants were accepted and project reports were filed, giving the grant recipients' competitors as long as 15 months to catch up.
"Small companies can't afford to be strung along that way," says one Phase I recipient who is still waiting to hear about a Phase II grant decision that was expected last September. He says he has been told over the phone since last December he would get the money, even that the check was in the mail, but so far, he hasn't seen a dollar. "There's no excuse for the way they operate," he says. The delay has cost him a specialist he couldn't afford to keep dangling and caused difficulties in his relationship with the third-party source of funding he was required to line up to complete his phase II application.
There are also complaints about the amount of time and money for Phase I grants -- mostly that it isn't enough -- and some concern that because proposals are usually reviewed by university professors, only academic-type projects get approved.
You might think with all the problems, that small companies would be wary of government support. And some, like Biospherics Inc., a $6-million company in Rockville, Md., have decided to reduce their dependence on federal grants and contracts. Biospherics, which recently received public attention for a patent on a process using "left-handed" sugars to make noncaloric sweeteners, has begun to emphasize the analytical and lab services that are more marketable to private industry.
Yet other small companies, some of the same ones that are most voval in expressing dissatisfaction with the current state of the NSF grants, think the idea of the program is excellent, or at the least, a step in the right direction.
But is that step enough? No, says Dr. Gilbert Levin, president of Biospherics. "The nation has to be willing to risk more than $25,000 and six months."
Stanley Mason agrees. Though Simco has applied for a Phase II grant, the $200,000 he would get would fund only a small portion of the tallow-tree development plan he has in mind. Still, he's optimistic. The NSF program did help Simco get past some of the scientific community's initial skepticism. And though he has no large company partner firmly committed to a joint venture, he's getting lab support from the R&D departments of six major corporations. Deutz Corp. has tested tallowtree fuel in tractor engines, and a large hospital-supply company is considering using tallow-tree fuel in 200 of its diesel trucks. A couple of food-oil companies are testing the seed's edible oils. S. C. Johnson, Neutrogena, and Mars Inc. have worked on applications in their industry.
"The government should support this," says Mason. "Even though a little company like ours is maybe a hundred times more efficient per dollar than any large companies, there aren't very many dollars to be efficient with." In the absence of large-scale government support, Simco is "foolishly" supporting the project on its own. "This is a project which must be done," says Mason. "We're going to get this damned thing off the ground. And, we hope, make money on it."
