There’s been a lot of questions about the recent “SBIR pilot project” solicitation for scientific instrumentation (NSF 26-511).
Some of the confusion stems from the fact that NSF released TWO SBIR solicitations on May 22:
- NSF 26-510 (what we’ll will call the “regular” SBIR solicitation)
- NSF 26-511 (the Scientific Instrumentation SBIR pilot solicitation)
Based on the NSF webinar explaining this new (26-511) solicitation on 6/9/2026, here is a brief summary:
- 26-511 does not create new SBIR money, all awards submitted to both 26-510 & 26-511 will come from the annual SBIR allocation at NSF
- Both solicitations have the same funding amounts for Phase I & Phase II, same Project Pitch process, same Full Proposal instructions & same evaluation criteria.
- Full Proposals submitted to NSF to either of these solicitations will be reviewed at the same time, by the same reviewer panels.
- NSF is expecting similar success outcomes between 26-511 & 26-510
- Much like how NSF currently may switch the topic between areas without any detrimental affect to the applicant, if an applicant applies to 26-510 but the topic could fit within 26-511, NSF may switch between solicitations.
- Although “Scientific Instrumentation” is NOT listed on the NSF SBIR Topic grid, this new “pilot” topics could be thought of as essentially just a new topic among the others found at https://seedfund.nsf.gov/what-we-fund/.
So an even quicker summary: There is essentially no difference between these two solicitations aside from the topical focus of the “pilot” solicitation.
