The purpose of the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) is to assisted United States businesses to carry out research and development on high risk, high pay-off, emerging and enabling technologies. These technologies are:

High risk, because the technical challenges make success uncertain;

High pay-off, because when applied they offer significant benefits to the U.S. economy; and

Emerging and enabling, because they offer wide breadth of potential application and form an important technical basis for future commercial applications.

The rules in this part prescribe policies and procedures for the award of cooperative agreements under the Advanced Technology Program in order to ensure the fair treatment of all proposals. While the Advanced Technology Program is authorized to enter into grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts to carry out its mission, the rules in this part address only the award of cooperative agreements. The Program employs cooperative agreements rather than grants because such agreements allow ATP to exercise appropriate management oversight of projects and also to link ATP-funded projects to ongoing R&D at the National Institute of Standards and Technology wherever such linkage would increase the likelihood of success of the project.

In carrying out the rules in this part, the Program endeavors to put more emphasis on joint ventures and consortia with a broad range of participants, including large companies, and less emphasis on support of individual large companies.