Ritchie Coryell
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard, Room 590
Arlington, VA 22230

Voice: (703) 306-3091
Fax: (703) 306-0337

Ritchie Coryell has been an SBIR program manager at the National Science Foundation since 1980. He was in fact the first scientist to join and to work in association with Roland Tibbetts, who had designed the program at NSF in 1977. Such an professional alliance took courage at the time because SBIR had not been received entirely enthusiastically by most of the NSF staff after Congress had earlier directed the Foundation to make about one percent of its awards to small business firms.

Primarily, Coryell early accepted and endorsed the basic premises of SBIR - that of increasing the participation of small high technology firms in government research and was enthusiastic about the potential contributions of small high technology firms to NSF research which might be achieved through the SBIR condition of requiring the small firms involved to commercialize their research results. To that end, in the National Science Foundation at that time, his professional background was perhaps unique since relatively few other NSF scientists had a business background and/or had experience with high technology companies. A graduate of MIT and CalTech, with an MBA from Harvard, prior to joining NSF in 1972 Coryell had worked with Texas Instruments and Hayes International, and had also been at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

A pioneer in the early days of the SBIR program at NSF, prior to its expansion to eleven federal agencies in 1983, CoryellŐs participation was extremely important to the then evolving program. Given his scientific and business background, Coryell assumed the role of working closely with all the NSF Research divisions. From the beginning he was an advocate for the commercialization goals of SBIR. It was he who recommended the use of the short commercialization plan in the evaluation process as well as considering the scientific merit and the follow-on funding commitment. This combination of analytical tools has proved invaluable in enabling selection of projects with more commercial promising for Phase II award in NSF.

Ritchie Coryell also was a pioneer in first introducing SBIR to most states through visits with officials and speaking at many state SBIR conferences since 1980. The solid acceptance of the program by the states was in good part his doing. During the years when SBIR was being considered by the Congress, state support was important to passage of the SBIR enabling legislation. He also was responsible for much of the growing acceptance of the SBIR program by NSF scientific and engineering staff members. After the SBIR legislation, while continuing his outreach work, Mr. Coryell also assisted other federal agencies coming into the program in the development of their programs.

For his pioneering spirit, advocacy of the goals of the program both within and outside of NSF and dedicated program management performance over 18 years Ritchie Coryell has indeed earned this award.