The fountain of knowledge: an epistemological perspective on the growth of US SBIR-funded firms

The premise of this paper is that a basis for firms receiving Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) research awards to develop commercializable technologies is not only their proposed creative ideas but also their endowment of attendant knowledge necessary to develop the technology being proposed. Based on this premise, we propose that those firms that have higher growth rates attributable to their SBIR awards are also those firms that are more creative and have more knowledge endowments. Empirically, we quantify a firms creativity and its sources of research knowledge in terms of its past experiences, and we find that firms with more technical experience and sector experience are those that have realized higher growth rates from their SBIR-funded research.