Release date: | May 22, 2003 | |
Contact: | Gary Spanner (509) 372-4296 |
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or | ||
Greg Koller (509) 372-4864 |
PNNL small business service wins national award
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RICHLAND, Wash. — An electronic alerting service for small businesses, created by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has won a national award for improving government through information technology. The E-Gov 2003 Trailblazer award honors PNNL’s free service that automatically notifies subscribers about current federal funding and related opportunities for small businesses. E-Gov (www.e-gov.com) is a national organization that promotes information technology to improve the public sector.
Federal agencies award more than $1.4 billion in grants every year to fund competitive research and development proposals submitted by small businesses throughout the country. The effort is known as the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer, or SBIR/STTR, programs. Each of 10 federal agencies administers its own program to seek and review proposals and award grants to hundreds of recipients.
With funding from DOE, PNNL created and operates the first free, nationwide service that selectively searches for, consolidates and regularly e-mails information from the 10 federal agencies on current funding available from SBIR/STTR programs. The service also lists upcoming SBIR/STTR training and conferences, plus tips from experts to help small businesses participate successfully in SBIR/STTR programs. A searchable Web site contains current and back issues of the e-mail alerts at http://www.pnl.gov/edo/sbir.stm.
Since PNNL began offering the service in 1997, more than 3,300 subscribers nationwide have signed up to receive the alerts. PNNL estimates the service has saved U.S. businesses up to $10 million annually by replacing time-consuming and inefficient searching with free, consolidated notifications delivered directly to the subscriber’s desktop.
The 20 winners of the 2003 Trailblazer awards were selected from more than 250 nominations across the country for “contributing significantly to enabling the business of government in their organizations.” Of the 20 Trailblazer awards and the 30 additional “Pioneer” and “Explorer” winners to be showcased at the E-Gov 2003 conference in Washington, D.C., in June, PNNL is the only national laboratory represented and the only organization affiliated with DOE. Winning organizations included the federal agencies responsible for homeland security, defense, treasury, health and human services, social security and emergency management, as well as state government agencies.
More information on the awards can be found at: http://www.e-gov.com/events/2003/egov/expo/gsc.asp.
PNNL is a DOE Office of Science research facility and delivers breakthrough science and technology in areas of environment, energy, health, fundamental sciences and national security. Battelle, based in Columbus, Ohio, has operated PNNL for DOE since 1965.
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