Bringing technology to market: National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute SBIR Phase IIB projects

Abstract The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) is the fourth largest institute in the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Surprisingly, there is a conspicuous void of policy studies related to the research activities of NHLBI in comparison to NIH or the National Cancer Institute. This paper investigates the likelihood that a business funded through NHLBI’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program will commercialize from its Phase IIB translational support. Commercialization is one performance metric that quantifies a policy dimension of the success of the funded SBIR project. Based on an empirical analysis of sixty-one Phase IIB projects, we find that the most significant covariate with the likelihood of commercialization is the growth in human capital within the business since the Phase IIB award.