research | The Contracting Education Academy

November 13, 2019 By cs

Failure is an option for DoD’s experimental agency, but how much?

Since 2015, millions of dollars have been invested in the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, the agency watched as some of its projects fell flat, and only about 23% the organization’s completed projects ended up in the hands of troops — but the thing is: DIU is completely fine with that.

DIU’s success statistics, delivered in a July report card to Congress, are the first long-term numbers to come out of the Defense Innovation Unit (formerly the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental) since its inception.

The metrics, which also address time-to-contract and other areas, highlight a vexing dichotomy currently playing out in the Defense landscape: How can the world’s largest military field state-of-the-art technologies faster to counter China and Russia without compromising oversight and opening the door for waste?

While successful DIU experiments ended up, or will end up, as technologies that will protect service members from drones and detect cyber vulnerabilities on DoD networks, 77% of completed prototypes DIU invested in failed to make it to contract or have yet to make it to contract. That leaves millions of taxpayer dollars on the table, which can sometimes be a hard sell for lawmakers. Congress remains at least marginally skeptical of the program built to convert private cutting edge technology for military use.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2019/10/special-report-failure-is-an-option-for-dods-experimental-agency-but-how-much/

August 27, 2019 By cs

Research, sponsored activity awards top $1 billion at Georgia Tech

Research, economic development and other sponsored activities at Georgia Tech passed a significant milestone during the fiscal year that concluded on June 30, recording more than a billion dollars in new grants, contracts and other awards. The record amount comes from federal government agencies, companies, private organizations, the state of Georgia and other sources.

The growth in new awards for sponsored activity allows Georgia Tech to take on complex and significant challenges involving multiple disciplines and collaborating organizations that bring together teams of researchers with a broad range of specialized expertise, noted Chaouki Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research.

“Tackling society’s most pressing challenges requires multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, business experts, policymakers and humanists, crosses multiple areas of specialization and often necessitates involvement from more than one research organization,” Abdallah said. “This level of funding allows us to participate in and lead more complex, more important and more impactful research projects. We are grateful to our research collaborators and to the state of Georgia for the confidence they have placed in us by providing these resources.”

The new funds also show Georgia Tech’s expanding role in national security, where defense agencies increasingly rely on the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) – Georgia Tech’s applied research arm – to tackle complex national defense, homeland security and related challenges. For some of this work, GTRI has contracts through its designation as a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) that delivers essential engineering capabilities to Department of Defense agencies.

Accounting for approximately $643 million of the $1,050,095,192 total, GTRI employs more than 2,300 engineers, scientists and support staff at facilities in Atlanta, Warner Robins and other locations around the United States. GTRI’s research spans a variety of disciplines, including autonomous systems, cybersecurity, electromagnetics, electronic warfare, modeling and simulation, sensors, systems engineering, test and evaluation, and threat systems.

Among the examples of large, collaborative projects funded at Georgia Tech during fiscal 2019 is a $21.9 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop new techniques for battling a potential flu pandemic. The project will involve five universities, a company and the Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention in developing new ways to help the body resist infection, fight the virus and boost the effects of vaccines.

In another example, Georgia Tech is leading a consortium of 12 universities and 10 national laboratories in a $25 million project with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to develop new technologies and educational programs to support the agency’s nuclear science, security and nonproliferation goals. The award will link basic research at universities with the capabilities of U.S. national laboratories.

Beyond defense and national security, Georgia Tech received a $13.5 million award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help bring together research teams working on a global grand challenge: reinventing the toilet. The project could improve sanitation for 2.5 billion people worldwide without requiring costly new sewer lines or wastewater treatment facilities.

In the humanities, Georgia Tech’s Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue and expand its innovative work in the digital humanities. The new award followed $1 million of initial funding from the Mellon Foundation that established the DILAC, which uses digital projects to engage undergraduate students in the liberal arts.

For its home state, Georgia Tech conducts research to benefit farmers and food companies with improved crop monitoring, food processing and inspection technology. And researchers recently helped the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services protect case managers with the development of ClickSafe, a small device that can quickly summon help if needed.

Solving critical challenges for research sponsors is just one part of Georgia Tech’s innovation pipeline. Research often leads to discoveries that can, in due course, become the basis for new products, new goods, new services and new industries. To create new jobs and new investment, Georgia Tech can license technology to existing companies and startups. During fiscal 2019, Georgia Tech filed 87 U.S. patent applications and executed 55 licenses for the use of intellectual property. At least seven startup companies were launched during the year based on research discoveries.

Startup companies in Georgia Tech’s VentureLab program – which helps faculty, staff and students create new enterprises – attracted $347 million in new investment during the fiscal year. During 2019, VentureLab assisted 111 Georgia Tech faculty members. The National Science Foundation I-Corps program, which helps faculty members prepare for commercializing technology, served 43 Georgia Tech faculty members during fiscal year 2019. Georgia Tech I-Corps teams attracted $14 million in investment.

In addition to its impact on the nation’s safety, quality of life and economic prosperity, Georgia Tech’s research program benefits its students by providing real-world experience. In fiscal 2019, approximately 4,000 students worked in the research program as graduate research assistants, while another 2,400 students participated in undergraduate research, supplementing classroom, laboratory and other educational activities.

Two measures are often used to assess the volume of university research programs. A number for total awards represents new funding provided during a specific fiscal year. These awards often support sponsored activities that take place across more than one year, so funding from a specific award may be included in multiple expenditure reports, which are the other metric commonly used for measuring research programs. An expenditures number includes the total amount actually spent during a specific year.

Georgia Tech conducts research through GTRI, its six academic colleges, 11 interdisciplinary research institutes and the Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech’s economic development and business assistance unit.

Source: https://www.news.gatech.edu/2019/08/26/research-sponsored-activity-awards-top-1-billion-georgia-tech

August 13, 2019 By AMK

OTAs primed for growth

Increasingly the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are looking to “other transaction authority” agreements to acquire emerging technologies.

Procurements made under OTA are exempt from many Federal Acquisition Regulation rules and are typically limited to research, prototypes and in certain cases follow-on production.

The authority dates back to the 1958 Space Act, passed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch, but in recent years it has heated up as the military and DHS have tried to leverage the innovation of tech startups that haven’t typically looked to the federal market for growth.

According to contracting intelligence firm Deltek, OTA spending hit $4.3 billion in fiscal year 2018, up from $2.1 billion in 2017. Because of increased interest in OTA procurement, Deltek recently began breaking out OTA opportunities and spending as a separate category in its GovWin database.

Part of the reason for renewed interest in OTAs is the need to innovate on the defense side faster than our adversaries.

Keep reading this article at: https://defensesystems.com/articles/2019/08/05/otas-set-for-growth.aspx

April 5, 2019 By AMK

Other transactions: Do the rewards outweigh the risks?

In recent years, the federal government has made a large shift in how it expends taxpayer dollars on federal contracts. Numerous laws have mandated new or expanded use of rapid procurement processes or other transaction agreements (OTA), which are now a preferred procurement vehicle.

OTAs, while not contracts governed by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), are legally binding contracts that were once considered tools of last resort because they put taxpayers and the government at risk.

The theory behind OTAs is that nontraditional vendors would be lured into the government contracting marketplace by streamlined procurement processes. The hope is that nontraditional contractors that were unable or unwilling to enter into traditional procurement contracts would come to the table and bring with them innovative solutions that traditional contractors were not offering. The reality, however, is that these speedy buying procedures are being leveraged by large traditional contractors that are looking to boost their bottom line by avoiding normal contract administration, oversight, and accountability protections.

“Other transactions” is a term commonly used to refer to the authority to enter into transactions other than contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements. Agencies have authority to award such agreements in limited circumstances — research, prototype, and now defense follow-on production projects. Unlike a normal government contract, OTA is promoted as a more flexible agreement that can speed up the buying process and be better tailored based on changes in technology and the government’s needs.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.pogo.org/report/2019/03/other-transactions-do-the-rewards-outweigh-the-risks/

January 3, 2019 By AMK

DoD’s new rules of the road for ‘other transactions’

For over 60 years, the U.S. government has entered into agreements called “other transactions.”

The Other Transaction Authority, or OTA, permits specific agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense, to enter into agreements “other than standard government contracts or other traditional mechanisms” like procurement contracts, grants and cooperative agreements.

While OT activity continues to increase, formal guidance regarding the effective use of such agreements has been sparse. In an effort to articulate some rules of the road, on Dec. 3, 2018, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment issued its broad “Other Transaction (OT) Guide.”

While the OTA has been available to the DoD since the late eighties, the DoD has ramped up its OT activity in recent years to obtain research, cutting edge technology and even full production of military hardware, awarding “$21 billion through 148 OTAs between 2015 and 2017.”

Congress has stated that the DoD “has authority to use OTAs with the most flexible possible interpretation.” As observed by the Government Accountability Office, OT agreements “can be useful in attracting … companies that have traditionally not done business with federal agencies.”

By its own terms, the guide was not intended to – and does not — provide step-by-step, mandatory instructions for the exercise of OTA by the DoD similar to the instructions in the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or FAR, for traditional procurement contracts. The guide cautions readers that it “is not a formal policy statement,” and does not purport to offer a final “interpretation of statutory, regulatory and formal policy requirements.” The guide states that those seeking to enter into an OT agreement “should consult with legal counsel.”

Nevertheless, the guide covers the waterfront of the DoD’s OT tools, and provides helpful examples, definition and context. This advisory highlights some key aspects of the guide.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/766534

Since 2015, millions of dollars have been invested in the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, the agency watched as some of its projects fell flat, and only about 23% the organization’s completed projects ended up in the hands of troops — but the thing is: DIU is completely fine with that.

Increasingly the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are looking to “other transaction authority” agreements to acquire emerging technologies.

In recent years, the federal government has made a large shift in how it expends taxpayer dollars on federal contracts. Numerous laws have mandated new or expanded use of rapid procurement processes or other transaction agreements (OTA), which are now a preferred procurement vehicle.

For over 60 years, the U.S. government has entered into agreements called “other transactions.”

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