Assessing the Effectiveness of Defense-Sponsored Innovation Programs as a Means of Accelerating the Adoption of Innovation Forcewide

Abstract

The Department of Defense (DOD) invests billions of dollars into innovation programs every year. One primary objective of these programs is to accelerate the adoption of critical new technologies force wide. This paper assesses the extent to which companies funded through defense-sponsored innovation programs (“program participants”), specifically the DoD Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, subsequently deliver their capabilities to the warfighter. By analyzing millions of contracting and subcontracting actions associated with thousands of program participants, we demonstrate that the DOD awards most SBIR funding to a small subset of program participants. Furthermore, companies in receipt of the greatest share of overall program funding are among the least likely to transition their technologies to the warfighter. We analyzed the structure of DoD SBIR to identify potential causes for this poor rate of inter-government technology transition. We determined that this outcome results from misaligned incentives, antiquated policies and regulations, anticompetitive solicitation processes, and the absence of thoughtful, standardized metrics for defining and measuring programmatic success. In conclusion, we offer a series of concrete recommendations to address these issues and position DoD SBIR to more effectively deliver capabilities to the warfighter.