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Air Force’s ‘Base of the Future’ ideas will be tested on Tyndall rebuild

January 23, 2020 By Andrew Smith

With 2020 in full swing, the Air Force’s cross-sector outreach program—AFWERX—announced this year’s innovation focus: the base of the future.

After Hurricane Michael decimated Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida in 2018, Air Force leadership saw an opportunity to rebuild with the future in mind.

“With the rebuild of Tyndall Air Force Base, the Air Force has an opportunity to create from scratch an installation that will be recognized as a center of excellence for innovation,” according to a notice posted to the beta.SAM.gov Contracting Opportunities site.

As the service looks to revamp a key base, AFWERX will be hosting a series of workshops across the country to get feedback on emerging technologies in a number of fields.  As part of its mission, AFWERX brings military leaders together with innovators from across the private sector, including industry, academia and “non-traditional contributors” through challenge workshops focused on specific needs.

“AFWERX enables thoughtful, deliberate, ground-up innovation across the Air Force,” the notice explains.  “This is accomplished through an innovative approach that combines startup urgency with the largest pool of motivated talent in the world to uncover opportunities to improve Air Force capabilities, connect and engage the right stakeholders, and facilitate outcomes.”

Continue reading at:  Nextgov

Filed Under: Contracting News Tagged With: AFWERX, Air Force, Base of the Future, Tyndall Air Force Base

Defense dominates experiment in streamlined bidding for innovation

April 15, 2019 By Andrew Smith

Streamlined solicitations for innovative commercial products and services, known as commercial solutions openings are beginning to take off in the Defense Department. Even the General Services Administration’s CSO service, which is open to all agencies for a fee, so far has been dominated by Defense users.

CSOs aren’t as well known or broadly used as their procurement-innovation cousin, other transaction authority, which gives agencies the ability to strike contracts outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation for research, prototypes and production to obtain technology from nontraditional defense contractors. Eleven agencies including Defense have OT authority.

GSA’s CSO holds the potential to bring civilian agencies, most of which don’t have OT authority, the ability to reach out to and select suppliers unencumbered by the Federal Acquisition Regulation. So far, civilian agencies haven’t been biting, but Pentagon organizations are, even though they have their own CSO provider.

The very first GSA CSO customer was none other than the Defense Innovation Unit, a once-experimental buying organization that invented CSOs. Originally designed to lure emerging companies to work for the Pentagon by easing the pain of federal procurement processes, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, lost the X last summer, when it was designated a permanent outpost for testing defense buying boundaries.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/excellence/management-matters/2019/03/defense-dominates-experiment-streamlined-bidding-innovation/155373/

Filed Under: Contracting News Tagged With: AFWERX, ANTX, commercial solutions openings, CSO, DIUx, DoD, experiment, FAR, GSA, innovation, OTA, other transactional authority, prototype, R&D, research

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