This is a great assessment of the response by the NRC. The operating phrase to focus on is "without prejudice," which in this context means "just fix the problems and try again."
We applied for a direct to phase 2 SBIR in 2020 and were thoroughly denied, mostly due to fixable errors in our application that we made because we put it together ourselves and had never applied for a grant before. After involving some consultants and the relevant institutions, we got a much lower impact score and are likely to receive the grant soon.
Moral of the story: you can't fake regulatory experience, and regulatory applications require specialist knowledge to put together correctly.
While that seems true, but reading previous applications doesn't help?
> and regulatory applications require specialist knowledge to put together correctly.
Again, seems trivially true, but (again) how come you can't copy-paste a previously accepted application? (I mean, if you find a very similar site, same risks, hazards, geology, weather patters, distance from population centers, blablabla, same technology, same trade offs... shouldn't it be okay? [assuming the regulations haven't changed])
have been up in the air for decades but nobody was serious about getting approval and building them. Oklo ought to be proud to be the first to get shot down, pick themselves up again, and submit a better proposal.
Most regulatory consultants give hyperfocused advice specific to your application, and cost in the ~$10k order of magnitude, sometimes pushing the ~$100k. Given the capital investments in applications, you'd be hard pressed to find successful, complete applications with enough details relevant to your proposal that you could simply plagiarize them.
For reference, our SBIR submission was over 200 pages, much of it containing _incredibly_ specific technical documentation about our system, clinical protocols, statistical analysis plans, etc.
Point being, it's not as simple as copy pasting a known good application.
So 200 pages of technical details seems like a pretty good thing to go over, understand and then base a new application on.
The regulations have a laundry list of things that need to be included in the application, right? Looking at bad and good applications helps form a mental model of how one has to actually present the answers to those items on the list.
Of course it's not literal copypaste but which part is black magic from a system integrator point of view?
Of course hiring someone who wrote a few successful ones helps, but they are also basing their new work on their previous one, no? (Again not letter by letter obviously. And in some cases some sections require more depth, more detailed answers, in some cases they are not applicable, but good applications are similar to each other, because they are complete, they cover all the required risk assessments, etc... if not, what going on, could someone help me understand this?)
We applied for a direct to phase 2 SBIR in 2020 and were thoroughly denied, mostly due to fixable errors in our application that we made because we put it together ourselves and had never applied for a grant before. After involving some consultants and the relevant institutions, we got a much lower impact score and are likely to receive the grant soon.
Moral of the story: you can't fake regulatory experience, and regulatory applications require specialist knowledge to put together correctly.
I wish them all the best in their resubmission!