Q & A with Cynthia Gonsalves acting director office of Technology Transition Office of the Deputy under Secretary of Defense

CHIPS, April-June, 2008

Your readers may want to know that we will be coming out with a call for proposals the first part of March. (Go to www.acq. osd.mil/ott/tti/ for information.) We are looking for the services and Defense agencies to provide submittals to us.

The TTI program is a joint program. Each of the services, some Defense agencies and U.S. Special Operations Command are allowed to submit a certain number. The services submit 10 proposals, and Defense agencies may submit five for this potential funding. The key thing with the Technology Transition Initiative is that we want to fund technologies having impact for the warfighter. We can only do this by ensuring the commitment to acquisition as the end state.

Another program that I talked about was the Technology Transfer Program. This is new at JFCOM. They are just starting to use CRADAs (Cooperative Research and Development Agreements) and other tools that are available such as Education Partnership Agreements.

Many times in the Defense Department we develop technology and capabilities, and industry, at the same time, develops similar capabilities. We would like to be able to work jointly to leverage each other's resources to take technology to the next level and commercialize it.

The reason DoD is interested in commercializing the technology is [that] we are not in the production business. Private industry is in the production business. We want industry to take our technologies and utilize them. We have made the heavy investment upfront, and we want to be able to buy products incorporating that technology.

We have examples like the Hearing Pill[TM], Attenuating Custom Communication Earpiece System (ACCES), HemCon Bandages, laser rangefinders, Battlefield Medical Information System-Tactical [BMIST]--and many things that I could go through in more detail with you.

This program is not new; it is something we want to grow--transferring technologies that the DoD has developed to the private sector for mutual application.

We use various capabilities to support technology transfer efforts. One is Partnership Intermediary Agreements. Our Partnership Intermediaries facilitate deals for us with the private sector and coordinate working agreements to develop capability jointly.

We have many success stories from doing this. If you go to www.dodtechmatch. com, you will see many of the success stories from these agreements.

We also have a partnership with an organization called MilTech (www.miltechcenter. com/). We are trying to leverage the Department of Commerce's Manufacturing Extension Partnership Centers (www.mep.nist.gov/). They have about 500 centers across the country to help small firms with manufacturing problems. Using MilTech, we can provide this assistance for small companies. It involves manufacturing and quality assurance assistance, looking at their production line and giving them advice on how it might be better postured to ramp up production capabilities. It includes a variety of things to ensure that we can obtain the capability that we need.