Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairmen Chabot and Smith and Ranking Members Velazquez and Johnson for their leadership on this bill. The SBIR and STTR programs have helped countless innovative small businesses grow jobs through American ingenuity. This bill will make these programs work even better by providing small businesses with additional tools for bringing innovations to market. Better SBIR and STTR programs mean more successful small businesses and more jobs. I especially want to thank my colleagues for supporting inclusion of two provisions that I put forward in committee. First, the bill increases the amount of money that grant recipients are allowed to spend on business and technical services, like market research, intellectual property protection; or participation in entrepreneurial training programs, like the highly successful Innovation Corps program. This helps small businesses, especially startups, use their funds where they know they are needed most, for technical assistance, creative approaches to problem solving, and other types of guidance needed in today's complex marketplaces. Second, this bill expands the highly successful Phase 0 Proof of Concept Partnership pilot program, which I helped create at the National Institutes of Health in a previous SBIR reauthorization. This highly successful program provides the earliest funding for researchers exploring the possibility of turning their research into a viable medical product.…”