The Defense Department’s innovation arm focused on trying to bring more commercially-developed solutions to warfighters faster last year awarded more prototype contracts than ever along with a sharp increase in awarded funding versus fiscal year 2022, but fewer companies ended up with government contracts transitioning their products for potential use.
The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) spent $502.5 million on commercial companies in FY ’23 with 90 Other Transaction (OT) awards to commercial vendors, increases of 145 percent and 11 percent respectively over FY ’22, DIU says in its FY23 Annual Report posted on its website on May 2.
The report says 10 commercial solutions transitioned to DoD users, down from 17 in FY ’22, the highwater mark so far since DIU-placed bets on companies resulted in the first three product transitions in FY ’17. The innovation unit stood up in 2015.
DIU issued 8 percent fewer solicitations in FY ’23, 33, than the year before, but received 8 percent more proposals, 1,768 than in FY ’22.
Doug Beck, DIU’s director, is on a mission to begin scaling the adoption of commercially-developed technologies across the DoD enterprise. In February, he released his plans for the next evolution of his organization, DIU 3.0, which includes lines of effort to bolster the agency and strengthen partnerships between the commercial technology sector and DoD (Defense Daily, Feb. 7).
The goal is to get new and innovative products and systems into the hands of combatant commands and other DoD users more quickly than is done through traditional contracting mechanisms.
“As we build upon this momentum in FY 2024 and beyond, everything we do at DIU—and across the public and private defense innovation community—will be measured against our ability to generate strategic impact,” Beck says in the introduction to the FY ’23 report.
The 10 solutions that transitioned to DoD users in FY ’23 include HII’s [HII] REMUS 300 small unmanned undersea vehicle, which received a potential $347.8 million Navy contract for mine countermeasures. Ascent Aero Systems’ Spirit small all-weather, coaxial unmanned aircraft system was added to the General Services Administration’s contract schedule as was Freefly Systems Alta X small quadcopter UAS.
Teleidoscope, which had received a $1.6 million prototype OT award with DIU, was selected by the Air Force Materiel Command to provide the company’s artificial intelligence-based visual recognition and identification system to replace the current system used for air security in the National Capital Region’s. Teleidoscope received a $16.8 million contract under DoD’s Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies Fund for its camera system. DIU says the award has a $100 million ceiling.
EpiSys Science, Inc., which had received a $1.2 million prototype award, was selected by the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Disruptive Futures Division to provide its autonomy technology for networked aircraft.
“This solution provides collaborative mission autonomy algorithms, or agents, that command large number of long range air vehicles (weapons, sensors, etc.) in order to penetrate contested airspace in a survivable and effective manner, reacting in real-time to changes in the environment or losses in forces,” the DIU report says.