External Collaboration in Army Science and Technology: The Army's Research Alliances

No laboratory can be expert in every area important to its sponsor. The laboratory must therefore find other ways to provide the needed talent to complete a project. There are many ways to do this some formal, some informal. The U.S. Army gains new technical knowledge through investing in its internal laboratories and in external expertise including single investigator grants and larger, focused centers of excellence. These involve varying degrees of close collaboration with internal Army laboratories. For example, the Army has determined that investing in University Affiliated Research Centers UARCs is desirable to obtain new knowledge in areas such as nanotechnology for the soldier and biotechnology. These are large centers consisting of a lead university and a number of associated universities and industries. The information developed is available to Army science and technology ST programs as well as to the general public. These centers are contracted for specific lengths of time and are renewable. Other sizeable investments are in Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives MURIs. There are also Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, specific Centers of Excellence, and the Small Business Innovation Research Program, which invests, typically, in small entrepreneurial companies that are able to add to existing internal Army research programs. Most of these programs are executed on contracts that do not specify in any detail how they should collaborate with Army laboratory work. It should be noted that these programs were not created with the intent to develop collaboration with internal Army laboratories. In this report we focus on more formal modes of collaboration exemplified by the Army Research Laboratory s ARL collaborative alliances. We do not attempt to analyze the other forms of investment in external centers of excellence.