Defense program taps into small business innovation.

• Author: Lundquist, Edward

Making the transition from research and development to acquisition by the military is hard.

A Defense Department program called the Rapid Innovation Fund (RIF) is designed to make that transition easier. It allows the military to collaborate with small businesses to provide innovative technologies that can be rapidly inserted into acquisition programs.

RIF is administered by the office of the secretary of defense, by the assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering and the office of small business programs.

"The RIF program is not about disruptive technologies, because these technologies are mature," said Bob Smith, the Navy's program manager for RIF. "But it has created a disruptive way of doing business because it has accelerated the acquisition process much faster than the normal budget cycle."

"It's not the innovation of the technology. It's the innovative application of a technology," said Smith. "It could even be an innovative process change. Sometimes it's the disruption of the bureaucracy."

Initial proposals consist of a four-page white paper. If nominated by one of the services' program executive offices and selected by the service, funding can be awarded for up to $3 million for two years to speed the insertion into a program of record. RIF doesn't develop technologies; it validates that existing technologies will meet a requirement of a program of record.

A recent RIF success story involved a small Massachusetts company working with Brett Gardner, an engineer at the Navy's Fleet Readiness Center Southwest in San Diego.

Gardner is involved in the maintenance and repair of aircraft, such as the Navy's F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet. He saw an interesting product offered by Mide Technologies of Medford, Massachusetts, at the 2011 Navy Opportunity Forum that he believed could be adapted to help the Navy test aircraft.

"We sell a vibrational energy harvester for vibrating machinery that can be used to power sensors, microcontrollers, low power antennas or things like that. It has to be tuned properly to optimize how much energy you'll get," said Jeff Court, a company executive. "So we developed a small accelerometer to measure the vibrations. The result was the original Slam Stick."

Gardner asked if the Slam Stick could measure G forces. The answer was yes.

Instrumenting an aircraft is very expensive, Gardner said. "It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there has to be an engineer assigned to the project. The...