SBIR-STTR Award

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. The Avascent/IN3 team will identify and qualify motivating factors that stimulate efficient contractor performance and establish an evaluation model for DoD customers to leverage in assessing those factors. Avascent/IN3 understand that there is a diverse set of factors that impact contractor efficiency and profit targets. We hypothesize these factors range from highly contractor-specific to technology-driven to contractual. With our initial hypotheses in place, we will rapidly leverage secondary and primary research through our proven methodologies and networks to vet and refine these lists of factors and associated variables, enabling us to transition to developing an evaluation construct that includes relative importance of each factor on contractor efficiency, interdependencies between factors, and levers available to DoD to influence each factor. We will then test the efficacy of the motivating factors and evaluation framework through a series of evaluation samples based on distinct contractor types, market sectors, and types of R&D programs to test the applicability of the evaluation construct as a program and customer-agnostic tool. Avascent/IN3 will design a tool that blends automated inputs with guided dialogs and reference points embedded in the tool to support manual inputs. This hybrid approach would automate tedious data entry of readily available information, while also providing the user decision aids within the tool to aid with inputs that require human judgement. During Phase I, Avascent/IN3 will leverage proven and scalable tools, including “low-code” platforms such as Microsoft’s Power Apps and Microsoft's’ robust AI/ML back-bone to quickly develop a capable and scalable RAPID solution for DARPA.

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.