4. Scientific/Technical Quality, Innovation, Originality
Throughout your proposal you must seek ways to convince reviewers that you and your firm are competent to conduct the highest quality work. You must also convince them that your project is innovative and original. The agencies do not identify a distinct part of the proposal for making this kind of argument. Nonetheless, it counts more than any other criterion.
In reading your proposal, reviewers will compare your objectives and approach with the totality of their experience in the technical field and their understanding of the problem. How your proposed effort stands up against their background will be a judgement call, involving some measure of subjectivity. Do not be willing to leave this judgement exclusively to the reviewers' intuition. You must make the case for your project through all components of your proposal, especially in discussing the project's significance and approach.
There are several reasons why reviewers may give poor scores for this criterion. For example, the proposed approach may not be distinctly different from others tried in the past:
"The proposal lists 3 ways of obtaining profiling data. These are the most obvious approaches which have worked in the past. Therefore I mark them down for originality.
"Offeror appears to be proposing a new/improved signal controller...no concepts, innovations or unique characteristics have been identified which would allow such improvement."
"doesn't indicate how what is proposed varies from currently existing production, keyword, printing systems used in China which deal with the complexity of characters in that language."
Reviewers will also note technical claims and assumptions which they consider unfounded:
"serious question whether a restricted natural language is better than a well designed query language.
"proposer thinks the problem with central control is reliability, It's not. It's communications cost."
"tests will be limited to forces on a stationary vehicle. Forces on a moving vehicle are likely to be even higher and the guidelines are likely not to be conservative."
Failure to consider important factors also will work against you:
"it is rather puzzling to note that the carrier gas flow rate and its effect on particle size and dispersity has not been discussed at all."
"no discussion of the capacity of people to handle and associate three different code inputs and another different code output in very close approximation."
"the offeror presents no reasons why polymethylmethacrylate will be effective in forming a barrier coat."
The key to demonstrating originality and innovativeness is to demonstrate familiarity with past work and how your project goes beyond it. Certain methods or techniques are likely to have been used in the past with greater or lesser success. Some approaches will have clearly turned out to be deadends, while others appear promising. Merely chronicling the past is not enough.
Take the opportunity to convince the reviewers that your objectives and approach have merit. Where possible use references to previously published work to support your assertions.
