SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Speed and efficiency in unlocking private sector innovation is central to advancing warfighter capability. The current pace of technology transfer between the Department of Defense and small/non-standard innovators increasingly responsible for these critical innovations, however, presents opportunity for improvement. This technology transfer is impeded in part by the manner in which DoD attracts and incentivizes these firms and procures their technologies. For DARPA, a particularly problematic component of the acquisition apparatus is the weighted guidelines method that currently informs negotiations of incentives for efficient contractor performance. Plainly stated: the weighted guidelines method is not effective at quickly and accurately identifying the factors that motivate small and non-standard innovators on the bleeding edge of technology advancement and does not align with the DoD’s increasing reliance on OTA acquisition mechanisms. It is with these considerations in mind that DARPA contemplates the R&D Automated Profit Incentive Determination (RAPID) tool as a potential replacement for the weighted guidelines method. In Phase-I, Avascent/IN3 engaged with industry to understand the unique nuances of the incentives which drive both traditional contractors and small/non-standard innovators to pursue work with DARPA. Further, Avascent has validated the technical feasibility of manifesting that industry insight into a tool which will enable the contracting officer to make more efficient, fair, and analytically robust profit recommendations to industry. In Phase-II, Avascent will build a production ready prototype of its RAPID solution. The utility of Avascent’s proposed solution for the RAPID tool is four-fold: (1) the ability to leverage a thorough understanding of the incentive structure of DARPA’s industrial base; (2) a user interface that will reduce evaluation times and increase the user experience for the contracting officer; (3) the ability to make analytically robust evaluations tailored to the nuances of different business types; (4) the creation of new industry datasets which will both power the tool and also offer additional benefits to DARPA contract management efforts outside of RAPID. The solution will be built on the Microsoft Power Platform, an open-architecture low-code development environment. The Power Platform will greatly reduce development risk for RAPID as many required technical features are standard inside the platform and because the platform is constantly maintained/upgraded by Microsoft. Additionally, using a Microsoft platform will enable the tool to be highly scalable and easily upgradable via the DoD’s existing Microsoft Office subscriptions.
