Almost every Department of Defense SBIR topic describes something the government already decided it wants. Open topics invert that. Instead of responding to a written requirement, you bring your own technology and argue that some part of the Air Force or Space Force needs it. The format was introduced to reach companies that would never otherwise read a defense solicitation, and it changed who wins these awards.
What an open topic actually asks for
The proposal is short by defense standards and the burden shifts from technical compliance to relevance. You have to show that a real government user has the problem your product solves, that your technology already works well enough to be worth adapting, and that adapting it is a defined piece of work rather than a research program. Reviewers are looking for a company with a product and a customer, not a laboratory with a hypothesis.
That is the opposite of what the research-funding agencies reward, and it catches people out. A brilliant unproven idea with no identified user is a weak open-topic proposal and a strong NSF one.
The customer relationship is the proposal
The strongest open-topic submissions come from companies that already found an interested end user — a squadron, a maintenance unit, a program office — and can describe the specific problem in that user's words. Some cycles have formalized this through memoranda of support or required end-user engagement; some have not. Either way, the substance is the same: someone in uniform or in a program office wants this, and you can name them.
Finding that person is legitimate business development, and it is what the pitch events, accelerators and matchmaking programs around defense innovation exist to enable. Start it before the solicitation opens, because the window between release and deadline is not long enough to build a relationship from nothing. The same instinct applies more broadly in selling a product to the government.
Dual-use is the point
Open topics were designed to attract companies with commercial businesses, so a genuine commercial market strengthens the proposal rather than diluting it. Private revenue, private investors and paying commercial customers are evidence that the technology survives outside a grant. Write the commercialization story as one product serving two markets, not as a defense project with a vague civilian afterthought — the reasoning in the commercialization plan carries directly across.
Expect the structure to change
Open topics have been reorganized repeatedly: availability, naming, proposal length, phase structure, matching-fund expectations and which components run them have all shifted between cycles, and there have been periods with far fewer open calls than the year before. Do not plan a company around a format that existed in a past cycle. Check the current announcement for what is actually open, and treat any advice you read — including this page — as background rather than as the rule set. If awards are slow to appear, decision timelines explain why.
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