A Report on the Navy SBIR Program: Best Practices, Roadblocks and Recommendations for Technology Transition

Over the past few years the Armed Services Committees have shown an increased interest in the DoD doing as much as possible to transition SBIR developed technologies into products or services that support the warfighter. As part of the 2006 National Defense Authorization Act they formulated the Commercialization Pilot Program CPP, which requests that the DoD SBIR program align itself more closely to Program Executive Offices PEOs, platforms and warfighter needs, and improve the acceleration of SBIR technologies to the field. OSD ATL responded to that language by requiring the Army, Air Force and Navy develop pilot programs aimed towards that goal. I thought the best way to get started was to appoint an expert, independent Tiger Team to perform a comprehensive study of the Navys best SBIR practices and worst roadblocks which impact technology transition. This report is the sum of their work, and will be a key document in providing guidance as the Navy maintains our continuous improvement philosophy for the best-in-class SBIR program. The report points out that the Navys program is decentralized, which allows the PEOs and SYSCOMs to play a dominant role in determining SBIR topic and award allocation. PEO ownership of the Navy SBIR program is the key to our success those with the technology needs and resources determine how to spend the SBIR investment. But, the study also found that there is substantial variation in practice and success improvements could be gained from better sharing of best practices, standardization of repetitive tasks, and better training of SBIR firms, Navy Technical Monitors, PEOs, Fleet leaders OPNAV and our contracting officers. This report provides Navy management with well thought-out, defined and documented findings, recommendations and initiatives that will help guide us as we work to make the Navy SBIR program better.