Generally, SBIR proposals are reviewed by a committee at the federal agency where the solicitation came from. In short - they are not read by people from the Small Business Administration (SBA) which oversees the SBIR program.
The committee typically includes the following types of reviewers:
- Sponsor point of contact (who works in a lab inside the federal agency that released teh solicitation)
- Academics
- Government lab researchers
- Corporate researchers in industry
- Other technically competent people in the community
Given several of the reviewers are likely not working directly in your field, you will need to work hard to make the first 3 pages of your proposal interesting and comprehensible while not making it condescending. The subsequent sections should be technical but draw from context provided in the first 3 pages. It's a fine line and it is always worth investing in making the proposal human-readable. Budget at least 2 weeks to write the proposal so you can test it out with other people and iterate.
This article builds on content developed by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship for MIT's Orbit Knowledgebase and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.