The Navy’s Catapult program is finding success in bridging the “valley of death” in the small business innovation research program.
The initiative is a path for Navy commands or organizations to find previous SBIR awardees and take advantage of their technologies today.
Shadi Azoum, the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command’s program manager for the small business innovation research and small business technology transfer (SBIR/STTR) programs, said Catapult helps shave off the timeline and accelerate the transition of a vendor’s technology with a second Phase 2 award of between $1.5 million and $1.7 million.
“There’s not a specific time frame that it has to be leveraged from. I always tell companies that my best advice to them is, if you’re meeting with a program manager, anyone, let them know what your past SBIR portfolio is so that we can review it, see if there’s a link in something, rather than us having to go through the traditional means of posting a topic and an announcement,” Azoum said in an interview on Ask the CIO after speaking at the West 2025 conference sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute.
The Navy launched the latest version of Catapult in October through a broad agency announcement. It is an interim technology maturity phase that provides assistance to small businesses whose SBIR/STTR technologies have been identified as having high transition potential.
The Navy says the average turnaround time for a new Catapult contract award is three to four months from the receipt of the complete procurement package. The period of performance is determined by the scope of the effort and is typically 24-36 months.
In fiscal 2024, the service says it had 88 active agreements, with 21% taking advantage of SBIR investments made by other agencies. It invested $248 million through the SBIR/STTR programs and received $63 million matching funds from a Navy customer. Last year alone, the Navy made 69 new awards, valued from $1.7 million to $13 million.
Azoum said NAVWAR is using prior SBIR and STTR awards for about 60% of their entire portfolio, including some efforts where they partner with the Air Force or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and even the Homeland Security Department.
“I think because NAVWAR is very cyber focused and very fast paced, it makes more sense for us to capitalize on prior investments than to go through the regular topic process,” he said. “For some of our internal government community that are interested in leveraging past involvement, we have publicly available databases. SBIR.gov is one of them where we can locate past awardees through there. We could search by keywords and locate some of the past awardees based on the needs that we’re looking for. But I would say a good tip is, and the beauty about the Navy SBIR realm, is that our program managers are the focal points. If a small business is interested in leveraging their past portfolio and would like to get in touch with the program manager to see if there’s a need for similar program managers in that center or vice versa, and if a program manager within our command is interested, they can talk to the relevant SBIR program manager to kind of get that going. I’m emphasizing the benefit of having one focal point for our SBIR program managers to be there for that opportunity.”
On the SBIR.gov website, Azoum said small firms also can find the current list of topics the Navy is looking for from small firms. Its next broad agency announcement goes out April 23 and closes May 21.
The Navy’s SBIR office is hosting open office hours on April 30.
Open topics is a reverse vendor pitch
The BAA outlines 45 topics, including everything from 400 gigabit high speed data and video communications to battle rhythm situational awareness and tasking to delay and denial of unmanned underwater vehicles.
Azoum said the Navy also has used in the past, last fall for example, open topics to get vendors to offer solutions to much broader problems.
“It’s almost like a reverse pitch of sorts, through the open topic avenue. Our award amounts are much smaller to kind of make sure we get a breadth of different awards that come across through that. But it’s still another avenue for insertion into our program,” he said. “One thing that is different than our traditional topics with open topics is that we are accepting solutions that are more mature. I believe our last cycle, we specifically called out for a manufacturing readiness level of eight to nine, which is very different than the traditional approach of going through phase one, two and three. But open topics is a way for us to accept solutions of various maturity levels and adapt it to Navy applications.”
He said the open topic BAA comes out annually with the Navy likely to issue the next one this summer.
Outside of Catapult and open topics, Azoum said NAVWAR has found a lot of success with the SBIR/STTR programs.
He said in 2024 about 41% of small businesses that do apply to their solicitations are brand new to the Navy. Of that 41%, he said 29% of those small businesses belong to a socioeconomic category like woman-owned small business or service disabled veteran-owned small business.
“One of the things I’m super happy about and proud to say about the Navy is that we lead our transition rate within the DoD for this program. Of $500 million of SBIR or STTR funded efforts, we have transitioned about more than $1 billion in that and that is more than $1 billion in phase three or non SBIR/STTR funded efforts,” he said. “We are growing our outreach. I think when you put various different enclaves of things to motivate companies to apply, they’re more likely to join in the program and understand that it’s easy for them to apply. One of the things that we are trying to do, like with every one of our topics, is issue topic workshops. That allows an additional supplement to what we post in our traditional announcements. We also have training videos and various different webinars that we host. I think having these various forms of media available, and freely available, to small businesses helps attract new entrants.”
NAVWAR’s priorities for SBIR
For 2025, Azoum said NAVWAR is trying to reach even more small firms who may be interested in SBIR and STTR efforts.
He said the use of “ask me anything” webinars have proven valuable, as did a topic workshop where they hosted a live question and answer session with topic authors.
As for recommendations for companies interested in SBIR or STTR, Azoum offered two pieces of advice.
“One is our announcements. We try to be very detailed about what we’re looking for so do read the announcements if you intend on applying. Don’t wait until the last minute as well. In our announcements, we have specific guidelines to make everything fair for our small businesses when we detail margins and font sizes. I know that’s very trivial, but those are things that I think are potential pitfalls that prevent a proposal from going to an evaluation,” he said. “I love that our program has the ability to have companies an intimate conversation with our topic authors, and that’s during a pre-release and open date. So if any small business is interested in applying to one of our topics, I would say the best is take advantage of the dates between pre-release or the duration. That’s one of the most valuable things because we do understand that crafting a proposal does take resources and time and energy, so it’s good to kind of iron those out before you do apply.”
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