Company Outcomes Research and Evaluation for SBIR (CORES) was an effort to build a sustainable capability to identify and measure firm-level outcomes for SBIR awardees. Hitherto, evaluation and assessment had focused exclusively on project-level outcomes. CORES addressed the impact of SBIR on firms. This required new capabilities that:
- Built a data bridge between the SBIR/STTR awards database at SBA and the Business Dynamics and other data sets at the US Census Department;
- Identified an evolving set of SBIR/STTR awardees along with critical identifying information for each firm – notably the Employer Identification Number (EIN);
- Developed a matched set of firms to act as a control group;
- Designed a database structure for maintaining data on both the awardee and the control group firms; and
- Ensured that the resulting database was fully and accurately populated
- Could generate answers to key policy questions, such as the impact of firm size, age, and participation variables on SBIR outcomes.
The CORES data platform was constructed in collaboration with SBA, Census, and NSF.
Dr. Gaster was the project director, working on this project in partnership with Dr. Andrew Reamer of George Washington University. Outcomes from the CORES project remain confidential, under agreement with SBA and NSF.
