If your target market includes federally funded research scientists, you will be pleased to find loads of useful information in the NIH’s RePORTER (Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool Expenditures & Results) database.
The RePORTER Query Interface
Here’s what the RePORTER Query interface looks like:
Example: Who Has Money For Your Target Application
Say you’ve got a great system to help people identify viruses from sequencing information. Here’s a query you might use to find people who need it and have money to buy it:
As you can see, you can even limit the query to find people with stimulus money.
Here’s a screenful of results from the above query:
Once you’ve got your results, you can click on the links for a closer look at the project and find out how closely the work matches your product’s application. You can use the information you find to revise your query if needed for more highly specific results. In the process, you’ll learn quite a bit about who’s doing what, and how, in your market. If you’re also interested in “where,” you can limit your search by US states and congressional districts to help you determine and compare the opportunities in different sales territories.
Example: What Is This Person Doing?
Say you’re preparing for a sales call on a certain federally funded PI, or you’d like to find out if he or she might be a good candidate for a product development collaboration. You can find out what they’re working on by looking at their federally funded projects. If you want, you can even open up the query to include some or all years back to 1985. But let’s see what Eric Lander has going right now:
Search Query for Eric Lander's Current Grants
There’s a lot of information behind each record, including contact information for the Principal Investigator, his or her grant history, publications resulting from grant support, and more.
For help with market research using the RePORTER database, contact Matthew Wygant at matthew@wygant.net.
