By Melissa Alonso | June 12, 2025

A new grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding research at Georgia Tech to better understand how public grants impact the growth of early-stage technology firms. Assistant Professor Paige Clayton of the School of City and Regional Planning is leading the project, which officially launched on June 1.

“This project explores how quicker public seed funding influences technology development and a firm’s ability to grow,” said Clayton. “We’re looking at the effectiveness of policy design through the lens of timing—how delays in funding may slow or even jeopardize firm success.”

The NSF’s Science of Science: Discovery, Communication, and Impact grant supports Clayton’s investigation into how funding timing shapes business outcomes. The full award details can be found here: NSF Award #2449637.

Working with co-principal investigator Evan Johnson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Clayton is examining two major federal grant mechanisms for startups: Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR). These programs provide funding from agencies like the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, and NSF.

Clayton said the idea grew out of earlier conversations with entrepreneurs in Georgia and North Carolina, who consistently reported delays in receiving funds. “They make firms essentially sometimes lose momentum, which can have detrimental follow-on effects for the firm itself,” she explained. A pilot study on NIH’s Fast Track process helped the team secure NSF support to expand the research across agencies.

The findings may help inform federal innovation policy. “We plan to share our findings with the National Academies,” said Clayton. “It should have direct policy implications for how these awards are made and for firms navigating these funding systems.”

Georgia Tech offers a strong foundation for this research. “There are state-level efforts here to support firms in accessing these grants. This kind of public funding is being actively used and studied at Tech,” said Clayton. Her research team includes students from computer science, engineering, and city planning.

The NSF’s Science of Science program supports research on how scientific discovery happens—how teams work, how ideas move from research to application, and how systems can improve. “It’s basically thinking of science as a setting that we want to try to understand from a social science perspective… to improve the conduct of science,” said Clayton.

The broader significance of this work lies in highlighting the public sector’s vital role in innovation. “We don’t see an optimal level of new knowledge creation when we don’t have public sector actors funding things that the private sector isn’t ready to fund yet,” said Clayton. “These programs contribute not just to individual firms, but to local economies and national competitiveness.”