A Look at Efforts to Streamline Technology Innovation at DOD

Defense Department officials are seeing benefits from streamlined acquisition models, prototyping and increased collaboration with the private sector for bringing in much-needed technology innovation into the agency, they said at the Defense IT Summit in Arlington, Virginia, last week.

The Pentagon has long been battling the proverbial “valley of death,” or the gap between innovation and full-scale technology implementation where innovative defense technologies struggle to transition from development to deployment. One barrier has been the acquisition process.

“How do we partner together better to get after these solution sets a little bit faster, and make sure that we’re not just going with a company that was the loudest when they came to us, but we’re going with the right company in these partnerships? I think that’s going to be the hard thing,” said Kaitie Penry, director of emerging technology and innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) at the event.

Leveraging Curiosity to Boost Innovation

Defense leaders are rethinking traditional technology development processes to enable a faster, more innovative approach that leverages curiosity and boosts national competitiveness.

Historically, technologies progress from lab research to prototype development, then to product deployment and to large-scale adoption. Software disrupts this conventional process by enabling rapid iteration and collaboration across different partners in the ecosystem, said Joey Mathews, superintendent of the IT Division at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).

“It’s about looking at it through the perspective of those three bridges — from lab to prototype, prototype to product to scale. Finding the right transition strategies depending on the problem set really matters,” Mathews added.

NRL fosters innovation by using industry partnerships in creative ways. This shift highlights the challenge of balancing speed in development, ensuring that rapid progress does not compromise long-term viability and scalability.

“We have to get creative about how we partner and how we really scale out these technologies,” Mathews said. “You don’t necessarily take a requirements perspective … you think about technological curiosity and what is in the art of the possible.”

Expediting Federal Acquisition

Government is streamlining acquisition with accelerated procurement pathways and enhanced collaboration with private industry.

The Defense Innovation Unit’s (DIU) strategic plan, DIU 3.0, helps boost the adoption of commercial technologies within DOD to enhance military capabilities and address critical operational gaps.

“The whole purpose is to find different mechanisms, different types of programming, regular engagement, both from a regional standpoint, but also with technological standpoint, to find those pockets of innovation in the private sector and then use programming … to bring those innovations into the department much faster,” said Kedar Pavgi, DIU’s director of commercial strategy and operations.

Penry explained how cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs) occupy a unique space in the legal landscape. While they are not traditional contracts, they function similarly in many ways.

Leveraging this approach, NPS collaborated with a new startup on a classified project and successfully secured their facility clearance in just seven weeks.

By investing in the project upfront, innovators can gain a deeper understanding of the problem set, ultimately leading to a more effective solution. Penry said this authority is a powerful tool that has not been utilized to its full potential, and expanding it could be fruitful.

“This is without the company having to win a contract. They’re able to see more of what the problem set is, so that they can build a better solution that then they can showcase,” Penry said.

Opportunities to Innovate

Federal innovators are creating events and opportunities for industry to showcase emerging technology solutions, like NPS’ Warfare Innovation Continuum (WIC).

The annual WIC Workshop brings together early-career engineers, junior officers and experts from industry, Navy labs and academia to tackle a maritime design challenge. Teams develop and present innovative solutions to sponsors, industry leaders and senior officers, addressing topics like undersea warfare, hybrid warfare and distributed maritime operations.

DIU is exploring how these one-time events like prize challenges can lead to contracted work and ultimately faster federal tech adoption.

“If you win a prize challenge, immediately, you should be able to take that activity of the challenge to a contracting officer, who can then award a follow-on contract,” Pavgi said. “That muscle memory has not been exercised more widely, so that we’re also trying to build out the pathway, so to speak, so we can show others in the department that, look, the ability to do all this exists. It’s just a matter of us being proactive about using the powers that we have and then using it to really help companies navigate the department.”

Defense agencies and partners are looking to build on this momentum, using alternate acquisition methods and partnerships to increase speed of adoption moving forward.

“How can DIU help run a prize challenge for us, as we’re trying to bring in an industry partner, that then on the back end is a CRADA that it goes into, and then from there, there’s still the sole source authority to do a contract. So, how do we partner together better to get after these solution sets a little bit faster?” Penry said.