Small Firm Research Supported by the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute focuses on and describes dimensions of research and innovative behavior in a unique sample of small firms publicly funded through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and discusses the policy implications from the descriptive findings. Section 2 briefly overviews the history of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its oldest Institute, the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Section 3 offers a roadmap for the study of small firm research funded through the NCI's SBIR program. Section 4 describes the data used to explore dimensions of small firm SBIR funded research. The findings from the empirical analysis of the data described in Section 4 that are related to the commercialization of NCI-funded new technologies are presented in Section 5.

The findings from the empirical analysis of the data described in Section 4 that are related to the outflow of technical knowledge through technology transfer metrics from NCI-funded new technologies are described in Section 6. Technology relationships are the focus of Section 7. Section 8 explores the dimensions of funded firms that responded on the NRC survey that they would have pursued their Phase II project in the absence of SBIR funding. Section 9 considers the social impact of the NCI as quantified through the producer surplus and consumer surplus generated from the sale of NCI funded research projects. Section 10 concludes with a discussion of the findings from the analyses related to the NCI's support of small firm research and offers a call for future studies that address this topic from the perspective of other NIH Institutes and Centers and from the perspective of U.S. research agencies in general.