What does a small business do with funding from the federal government?
If the company is Advanced Ceramics Research Incorporated, they do a lot!
The company, also known as ACR, has successfully transferred technologies they have developed through
government funding to both federal and private sectors.
From NASA and the Department of Defense, to the biomedical field and international
business, this small company in Tucson, Arizona has a knack for finding new homes for its technologies.
Technologies that the firm has developed through the Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, Program.
Regardless of the economic climate, ACR, is always thinking of new markets for those technologies.
It is a little bit of a juggling act you have to be somewhat dynamic and roll with the punches.
We constantly think of application because sometimes one application that you think of can never happen.
ACR was founded in 1989 by Mark Angier and Anthony Mulligan. What began with
only a thousand dollars in start-up funds has since become a world class company that
focuses on developing state-of-the-art high temperature, high strength ceramic materials and processes.
In the late 1990s, ACR received an SBIR award from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
to develop a rapid-prototyping technology for producing new composite materials.
Materials that would enable a new generation of low-cost propulsion components for
NASA and the Department of Defense.
That same research then led to the development of a very unique experimental process in the biomedical field.
Enter PlastiBone By combining computer modeling and revolutionary materials, ACR
has developed an innovative technology that may one day be used to create artificial bone grafts.
Through an SBIR funding from the NASA Langley Research Center, the firm is now
developing new technologies for radiation shielding applications. Yet another example
of ACR spinning out a new application from the research originally begun with Marshall.
Recently, the company entered the field of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.
Through an SBIR award from the Office of Naval Research, ACR has teamed with another firm to
develop and deploy the Silver Fox. A small tactical UAV that uses high tech eyes in
the sky camera technology to gather intelligence information and then simultaneously
relay the images to a remote laptop on the ground.
Besides the federal government, ACR pursues commercial applications for their research.
Licensing their technologies to other industries has been an important mechanism for the company.
What they will be able to do with the technology we would have struggled to do ourselves and would have
longer to commercialize and really do the product development that they are capable of and they of course have
the marketing clout like a small business like ACR doesn't.
The company signed a 10-year, multi-million dollar license agreement, allowing a U.S.
company to use one of their technologies to improve the efficiency of oil and rock drilling.
And, one of their technologies has been licensed to Kyocera in Japan, the global
leader in ceramics for communications applications.
ACR extends its partnerships to the academic community as well. From the beginning,
the firm has collaborated with colleges and universities, believing that academic
partnerships are critical to its research and development success. In addition working
with the faculty, ACR regularly employs university interns on staff.
It's a great relationship that we have been able to look at prospective employees and sort of test drive them
before hiring them and it also gives us a very close connection with the University and doing some of the
technology transfer. With product demands on the increase, ACR recently formed a joint venture,
Advanced Ceramics Manufacturing, or ACM. Through a cooperative arrangement, the owners of
ACR are building a new facility on the nearby Tohono Oíodom reservation.
We proposed a partnership where we would try and establish a manufactoring arm of ACR on a reservation
and train people on the reservation to do technical jobs there.
Angier believes federal funding is responsible for the technical superiority his company has today.
But, it's more than that. ACR knows how to put its government funding to
work by constantly searching for those new applications and opportunities.
We are not doing this just for research sake. We are doing this because we see a
big commercialize potential out there. And we have worked very hard to commercialize that technology.