SBIR-STTR Award

Since the emerging US national security innovation base depends on commercial markets and private capital, it exposes the Air Force (AF) to new risks. For example in 2019, Chinese companies were party to 163 investments into US companies, with $6.5 billion of investment – a huge sum. Just this year, OneWeb, a commercial broadband company with a constellation of 650 satellites, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, threatening the U.S. Space Force’s access to commercial broadband in the Arctic region. Yet despite this critical dependency on an innovative private company, the US Government had no prior warning of OneWeb’s declining corporate health before its sudden bankruptcy. On the other hand, commercial companies around the globe are driving innovation in strategic fields, such as artificial intelligence (AI), command & control (C2), and space, presenting an opportunity to help the AF maintain its technological edge. Indeed, numerous national security experts have recognized the increasingly central role of the new innovation landscape, including senior Air Force leader Christopher Benson, in his Master’s thesis “Cross-domain comparison of quantitative technology improvement using patent derived characteristics.” The problem, in essence, is the same as that faced by most Fortune 100 companies: survival requires rigorous market intelligence of company-level risks, and industry-level technology trends, around the globe. BlueFoot addresses this challenge by bringing patent data, revenue data, investment data, product data, and mergers & acquisitions (M&A) data to one single integrated platform. At the company level, BlueFoot enables unparalleled threat analysis which can identify weaknesses and opportunities for engagement with technology companies in real-time. BlueFoot determines risks associated with the identified companies, and triggers alerts when conditions for the determined risks are met. On the industry level, BlueFoot analyzes the innovation landscape, innovation clusters, and trends in a specified industry space. BlueFoot would enable the AF to proactively monitor technology clusters, and generate informed inferences and predictions about the state of the innovation landscape.

The key focus for this Phase II proposal is to provide the Office of Commercial and Economic Analysis (OCEA) under SAF/CDM with that advanced awareness of potential foreign influence on critical DAF technologies. The problem is that DAF requires a new defense capability that timely detects entities that own, jointly-own, invent, sell, or buy patents related to the defense-critical technologies, and timely communicates foreign influence risks based on geographical and temporal relations among those entities. BlueFoot addresses this problem by modifying the BlueFoot commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platform to leverage its commercially-proven patent machine-learning (ML) capability. BlueFoot’s cutting-edge ML capability can ingest and classify millions of U.S. and foreign patent documents, to automatically find patents pertaining to defense-critical technology domains of concern (e.g., space technology, microelectronics, hypersonic, etc.). Based on the patents discovered by the ML system, BlueFoot can identify entities (e.g., organizations, universities, or personnel) that own, jointly-own, invent, sell, or buy the patents related to the defense-critical technology domains. BlueFoot COTS platform currently serves multiple Fortune 500 companies to accurately analyze innovation trends by technology domains. BlueFoot’s commercial customers include: Google Inc., Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Corning Inc., CrowdStrike, and Gates Corporation, among others.