[Orcnet] Do you know anything about small business grants

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 03:32:05PM -0800, Federici Business Group wrote:
...
> article published by the Commerce Department's Minority Business 
> Development Agency on their website titled, "The Myth of Free Government 
> Money: a Perennial and Pernicious Scam".  The URL for this article is:
>            
> http://www.mbda.gov/?section_id=3&bucket_id=101&content_id=3286&well=entire_page

Great article!  It mentions SBIR grants, which might be available
for some kinds of engineering work, but my one experience with 
those was that they are not a solid basis for building a business.

I was engaged for consulting work for a local engineering company,
allegedly to design a chip to go in a product.  It turns out that
the company lives off SBIR money;  they did not have a specific
customer need in mind, they just wanted a chip (because that was
a condition for an SBIR grant).  After a couple of frustrating
months attempting to build a specification for a chip with no
real application, I refunded their money and walked away.  There 
seemed like no way this was going to turn into a real product.

What happened to the old fashioned "please customers and get paid"
business model?  It seems like a lot of people prefer to get
something for nothing.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs