Industrial Innovation and Partnerships Division (IIP)

The Directorate for Engineering’s newly created division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships (IIP) serves the entire foundation by fostering partnerships to advance technological innovation, and plays an important role in the public-private innovation partnership enterprise.

One of the four strategic goals of the Engineering Directorate is to effectively invest in fundamental engineering innovation that has the potential for high impact in meeting national and societal needs. The focus of IIP is to successfully invest in engineering research and innovation by leveraging federal, small business, industrial, university, state and community colleges resources. Genuine partnerships are dynamic and growing relationships based upon shared interests, trust, and an evolving technical relationship. Partnerships require a vision and performance goals and benchmarks, passionate and visionary leaders, and partners bound by an essential interdependency and shared commitment to hold them together. Partnerships should facilitate the sorts of infrastructure that can sustain and nurture the spread of innovative activity over the long term.

These infrastructures are to educate and train human capital for the research enterprise and the entrepreneurial aspects of innovation; develop the social networks characterized by shared commitment and trust that embeds the intellectual capital and know-how embodied in scientists and engineers honed through advanced education and training; and to build a base of operational support without which sustainable partnerships cannot exist. This includes a diversified base of private investment, the physical place to provide a context for incubation, technical, management, and administrative support, laboratory and other capacity, communications services, and reliable sources of capital. One end of the innovation spectrum within the Directorate constitutes the unsolicited research proposals with ideas generated by the academic community to the other end with small business research proposals aimed at pursuing opportunities to commercialize products and services.

IIP is home to the two congressionally mandated small business research programs, the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program. Several programs in the Directorate that have non-academic partnerships as an important component to facilitate the engineering innovation process have been brought under the IIP umbrella. Thus, IIP also manages the Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) program, which stimulates innovation by building partnerships across the scientific and engineering community. In addition, the IIP leverages industrial support through two research programs, the Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC) program and the Grants Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) program.

The IIP Division accepts only those proposals that are submitted in response to an open solicitation and will not accept proposals for past solicitations that are closed. Unsolicited proposals are not accepted except for the GOALI program, where the proposals are submitted to the respective disciplinary programs.