You've raised several very interesting points within that question.
The first is that there's a real education and outreach component to what my office does, in terms of going to the agencies and helping them understand and realize that small businesses can really provide the highest-quality, most innovative goods and services out there. There is a risk aversion, I would call it, for lack of a better word, that sometimes leads them to prefer a large business, and it is a prime function of my office to help educate them. As you know, there are also all of these small businesses that can do these things, and you're not taking on more risk, necessarily, by using them and are often getting a much better product or service.
In terms of proving this out through the SBA or the OME, we do some of that. In an informal way, the SBA is one of unfortunately few federal agencies that consistently hit a number of the small business procurement goals. That is a testament to the fact that, one, there's motivation to find small businesses that can provide these goods and services at the SBA; two, once you start down that path and reap the rewards of these high-quality goods and services from the small businesses and get away from the mentality that only a large business could do X, Y or Z, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you do more and more of it; and then three, we have set up some more formal ways for that last piece we talked about—proving the concept, proving the technology.
For example, we have a program called small business innovation research, the SBIR program. It's a grant program under which federal agencies that have a research budget over a certain threshold must allocate 2.5% into this program. It gives, phase one, awards for proof of a concept; phase two, grants that are slightly larger in dollar amounts to bring the technology along; and the goal is to get all of the participants through phase three, which is commercialization of their technology or their good, their product. The SBA is tasked with overseeing the program and making sure it's running effectively and that agencies are playing by those rules.
Those are a few different things that try to get at what you were asking. I can follow up on any of them, but I hope that was somewhat helpful.