Proposal Pitfalls: Significance and Innovation

Crafting Compelling Grant Stories

Imagine spending over 100 hours meticulously preparing your SBIR/STTR application. You confidently press the “submit” button and sigh a breath of relief. Later, your thoughts meander back to your application and you wonder, “did I tell the right story?” Grant writing is both technical writing as well as storytelling, but many grant seekers neglect to tell concise and compelling stories when writing their grant application. The NIH pays particular attention to significance and innovation criteria in their evaluation, so it is imperative to tell a concise, cohesive, and comprehendible story so that your grant has a reasonable likelihood of being funded.

Focusing on Key Problems

The significance criterion holds the greatest weight for NIH reviewers. Many grant writers submit overly broad content, such as curing cancer, to satisfy this section, leaving much to be desired by reviewers looking to identify projects solving key problems in the medical literature. In sharp contrast, the significance section of a compelling grant application funnels broad ideas down to a specific problem or set of problems clearly present in the medical literature. Specific, highly important, and actionable problems are required to satisfy the significance criterion.

The same is true for the innovation criterion. Not only does your innovation need to be clearly understood by the reviewer, an explicit connection must be established between the innovation (your solution) and the problem identified in the significance section. Making this connection in a clear and non-distracting way is a key part of a successful SBIR/STTR application.

Unlock Funding Potential

Blue Haven Grant Consultants has more than a decade of telling compelling and grant-worthy stories. Our proprietary Significance-Innovation Analysis™ process helps identify the specific details an NIH reviewer is looking for in your project and reassembles those pieces into a compelling, cohesive, and comprehendible grant application story with a high likelihood of being funded. If you’re interested in exploring how our established and systematic process will help your project, please contact us to set up an appointment.