Biomedical academic entrepreneurship through the SBIR program

This paper considers the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program as a policy fostering academic entrepreneurship. Using unique data on NIH supported biomedical scientists, we trace the incidence of academic entrepreneurship through the SBIR program and examine the impact these scientists have on the performance of the SBIR firms they found or join. Our results show that the SBIR program is used as a commercialization channel by biomedical academic scientists. Moreover, the SBIR firms associated with these scientists perform significantly better than other SBIR firms in terms of follow-on venture capital funding, SBIR program completion, and patenting.