It is not necessary to be a corporate giant to innovate. It does not require spending millions of dollars on research and development, or having a major university laboratory at one’s disposal.
Some big corporations, of course, also have won Stevies -- a business equivalent of filmdom’s Oscars -- celebrating their innovations. Such companies as Dow Jones, AT&T, Humana, Textron and Expedia have trumpeted their awards in press releases.
For all its legitimate importance, the word “innovation” has become something of an all-purpose cliché.  Punch it into the Google search engine -- itself a prime example of innovation on a grand scale -- and one gets no fewer than 87,800,000 “hits.” A dictionary definition is quite straightforward: Merriam-Webster Online sees innovation as “a new idea, method or device.”
Peter Drucker, the management guru who wrote the classic Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 1985, saw innovation as “change that creates a new dimension of performance.” And, Drucker wrote, “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship … the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”
The U.S. government long has recognized the potential for small business to advance such change. The Small Business Innovation Development Act, passed in 1982, created the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program for that purpose.
President Bush reaffirmed the importance of the program in a 2004 executive order in which he declared continued technological innovation to be “critical to a strong manufacturing sector in the United States economy.”
“The federal government,” Bush said, “has an important role … in helping to advance innovation, including innovation in manufacturing, through small business.”
In 2005, the 11 federal agencies participating in the program, administered by the Small Business Administration’s Office of Technology, disbursed more than $1.85 billion in competitive awards to qualifying small firms. The great bulk of those awards -- some 96 percent, according to a National Research Council study -- have been made by the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
As the nature of the key agencies involved suggests, such government-backed programs are skewed heavily to the technological. A compilation of successful 2007 proposals posted on a Defense Department Web site, for example, lists such arcane items as “Direct Diode Pumped Blue-Green Laser,” “Ambient Temperature, Solvent-Free Plating of Dense Aluminum Coatings,” and “Extremely Low Frequency for Anti-Submarine Warfare.”
But if government awards focus on the technological, there is much opportunity for small business entrepreneurs to make their mark with more down-to-earth innovations like King’s food baskets.
 

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