Defense Agency Turns to Open Innovation for Technology Needs

December 11, 2013 By IdeaConnection

defenseThe US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has launched an open innovation portal called Needipedia to find solutions to some of its pressing needs.

The aim of the platform is to circumvent the often slow procurement process for emerging technologies and harness a more diverse base of solution providers.

The webpage allows the DIA to directly communicate its needs rather than issuing a new RFP every time it has a new requirement. What it does now is simply point to the site which has a wish list of its needs.

There are ten needs listed at the moment and these include:

Supports Contingency Response – develop and implement a unified contingency response to facilitate rapid transition to support multiple, concurrent military contingency operations.

Enhances Counterintelligence and Security – DIA seeks enhanced counterintelligence and security measures to ensure the physical security, operational security, and operational effectiveness of DIA personnel and operating locations.

“We want industry and academia to be able to participate, in place, with as little barrier to entry as possible,” said Dan Doney, DIA’s chief innovation officer.

“Obviously I can’t expose mission data to folks on the outside, and there are some mission systems I can’t represent to them. But with as much fidelity as we can, we’re going to bring those systems out. What that allows is that a garage innovator in Austin, Texas, or a grad student at Carnegie-Mellon can contribute to our mission setting in a safe house in a way that drives the standards that are being pushed by ICITE (Intelligence Community Information Technology Environment).”

Open Innovation and the Intelligence Community

Needipedia is an early component of the Open Innovation Gateway, a new technology acquisition approach to support ICITE, the shared services cloud architecture that eventually will be used by the entire intelligence community.

To read more about this story, click here for an article on the Federal News Radio website.


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Reader Comments


What you basically are saying is you need a "suggestion box" pointed questions & situations you need a field of potential ideas to address the particular problem. Then make it simple to respond with an academia SUGGEST BOX email & website....then just review whT comes in.
Posted by Cindy Selvaggio on December 18, 2013

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