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How does a small government contracting company break out of its mold? Richard White knows.
When you are only doing support service contracting, the type of work that you do and the expertise that you have is
very dependent on what type of tasks you get from the government.
White works for ViGYAN Incorporated, which was founded in 1979 in Hampton, Virginia, to provide aerospace research
and development support services to the NASA Langley Research Center.
Your ability to function as a company or the staffing level that you have is very dependent on government funding
or winning a particular contract.
Seeking greater control over its own direction as a company,
ViGYAN began looking for other marketable technologies that might be developed with in-house expertise.
In the early 1990s with funding from the SBIR program, several ViGYAN employees developed Pilot Weather Advisor,
an innovative satellite-based system that provides continuous broadcasts of weather information directly to aircraft cockpits.
Although the idea was a good one, ViGYAN had a slight problem- Pilot Weather Advisor was literally ahead of its time.
There was not an affordable business model that gave us the satellite capacity to provide the Pilot Weather service and
there were not the displays in the airplanes to support the Pilot Weather idea.
Around 1997, both of these things began happening and we made a company decision at that point it was now or never.
Although some private sources were found, most of the money for the Pilot Weather Advisor project was coming from company profits.
But, ViGYAN believed in its concept and so did NASA.
The Agency provided some additional funding. Pilot Weather Advisor finally became a reality.
After you're all done, you still have something that's yours because the government is basically paying you to
develop the technology and then saying OK, you can keep this technology, it's up to you now to go do something with it.
And that's exactly what ViGYAN did.
The project was so successful that in April of 2002, ViGYAN sold its Pilot Weather Advisor technology to WSI Corporation,
one of the world's leading providers of weather information systems.
Today, ViGYAN continues in its support services role, but the company has also expanded into aeronautics research and development;
scientific, engineering, and business software development; and computer technology support.
By participating in the SBIR program VIGYAN was able to break out of its mold and grow in new directions.
By being involved in the SBIR program and developing a commercially viable type technologies
you're a little more in control of the direction you're going in as a company, and you're not wholly dependent on just
doing certain tasks that the government gives you, but you actually have a product that you can sell
to another person, or sell the project to another person as Pilot Weather for example did.