Several years ago the National Science Foundation surveyed the small businesses that had won its innovation research grants (through the SBIR program) to see how they were progressing five and ten years after their awards. While there were unquestionably many successes, of those companies that failed, or where the SBIR-funded projects didn’t go well, the most common reason was that companies made products no one wanted.
In other words, for what was typically regarded as a grant to fund risky R&D, the biggest reason for failure was market failure . Perhaps similar reasons exist when education innovations don’t get widely disseminated?
