SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an offering designed to help early stage entrepreneurs identify their knowledge gaps, business risks and market challenges, and prescribe actionable measures that enable the entrepreneurs to reduce or ameliorate their risks, thereby increasing the likelihood of success in innovative new ventures. Today, such diagnostics and prescriptive remedies are delivered in one-on-one engagements with entrepreneurs. This application strives to make diagnosing and addressing the knowledge gaps of entrepreneurs a scalable endeavor. If Guidewire Group's expertise can be encapsulated in this platform and delivered to entrepreneurs in a highly scalable fashion, this project may shift the way in which entrepreneurs evaluate and improve their business performance. It is no secret that the U.S. economy relies heavily on entrepreneurial activity to deliver economic growth. Each year, hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs start new businesses. But according to the US Small Business Administration, over 50% of businesses fail in their first five years. The SBA estimates that in 2007, 637,100 new employer firms began operations and 560,300 firms closed that year. The number one reason the SBA cites for this statistic is lack of experience among entrepreneurs. First-time entrepreneurs often lack the experience to validate their judgments, qualify their actions, and assess their performance. Yet because evaluating and coaching entrepreneurs are typically un-scalable activities, little has been done to make a significant impact on the business sustainability or performance of these entrepreneurs. The system proposed in this SBIR Phase I project has the potential to make market-leading diagnostic expertise available in the form of a self-service, Web-based application, thereby distributing actionable diagnostics more widely than ever before

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a Software-as-a-Service platform to provide Assessment, Discovery, Monitoring, Benchmarking, Comparison, and Promotion of early-stage companies, initially in the information technology and clean energy sectors, in order to provide scalable support with predictable outcomes for entrepreneurs. Guidewire Group is developing the underlying technology platform, assessment methodology, assessment training, automated work plans, curriculum, and portfolio management applications that enable startups and those that work with them to more effectively grow their businesses. If successfully commercialized, the application stands to significantly scale the delivery of business development and advisory resources to early-stage companies and deliver predictable outcomes that improve a company's likelihood of success. By aggregating assessed data on startups worldwide, the application will provide a global context that enables startups to compete more effectively in world markets and to connect more efficiently with a global Innovation Ecosystem that buys and sells services from and to startup companies. Moreover, by delivering the platform in conjunction with a suite of best practices curriculum and a global community of entrepreneurs, the platform will enable organizations that support and incubate startup companies to more effectively manage and map the training of their companies