This section includes information on the DoD Information Analysis Centers (IACs) applicable to the acquisition of Commercial Off-the-Shelf Products and Commercial Services.
DoD Information Analysis Centers are an essential tool for discovering and delivering superior warfighting capabilities through comprehensive scientific and technical research, analysis, and creative mechanisms to recruit non-traditional researchers, engineers, scientists, and program managers to solve the most challenging technical problems. With more than 600 technical area tasks (TATs), the DoD IACs currently support all three military services, OSD, labs, civilian agencies and all nine combatant Commands (COCOMs). The DoD IACs serve the needs of the warfighter by bringing the "Think Tank" to the Battlespace.
IACs support the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (ASD) for Research and Engineering (R&E) in carrying out the R&E community's three strategic guiding imperatives:
- Mitigate new and emerging adversary threats that could degrade U.S. (and allied) capabilities;
- Enable affordable new or extended capabilities in existing military systems; and
- Develop technology surprise through science and engineering applications to military problems.
Ongoing Initiatives:
Technology Domain Awareness (TDA) is an initiative to better understand the technology landscape as it relates to defense needs. It is a Defense innovation business process based on shared technology information and related operational concepts and lessons learned to support better technology decision-making. The IACs’ TDA initiative is building an expanded Defense technology innovation community of practice that incorporates DoD stakeholders, traditional defense industry, the start-up and venture capital communities, and the academic research community. It employs a combination of incentives, information, shared infrastructure, and services to:
- Facilitate the rapid identification of defense-relevant technology opportunities and challenges,
- Enable collaborative development and prototyping activities,
- Develop a learning context for defense technology innovation, and
- Link and scale distributed innovation efforts to enhance transition and address DOD-wide learning objectives.
In January 2015, as part of a TDA pilot deployment authorized by ASD(R&E), the IACs awarded a $100M Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract to the National Security Technology Accelerator Consortium (NSTXL) to identify, vet, and prototype innovative energy technologies for reuse to address military needs. NSTXL is a non-profit, membership-based consortium consisting of over four hundred businesses, universities, and research laboratories, incubators and investors. It provides unique resources and services, including a database of over 250,000 technology providers and experts, for engaging the non-traditional high tech community (I.e., R&D businesses and organizations that do not ordinarily transact business with DOD) to prototype advanced energy technologies for Defense applications. Additionally, the NSTXL’s Technology Challenge program provides DoD access to vetted technologies aimed at addressing specific needs.
Additional information on NSTXL can be found at www.nstxl.org.
For more information about IACs go to http://iac.dtic.mil/tda.html.
