Innovation Acceleration: Companies Ask if Pentagon's Innovation Ecosystem Is Getting Out of Hand.

• Author: Carberry, Sean

For years, technology companies and defense officials lamented that the Defense Department's acquisition system--built for procuring battleships and bombers--was too complicated and cumbersome to acquire commercial technology.

Thus, officials like the late Secretary of Defense Ash Carter worked on creating new pathways and offices for the department to rapidly ingest cutting-edge products from nontraditional defense companies.

While the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has existed for decades to accelerate early-stage research and development, it doesn't address the universe of commercial technology, hence the department started standing up entities like the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental and the Strategic Capabilities Office that used nontraditional contracting mechanisms like Other Transaction Authority and the Middle Tier of Acquisition pathway to break free of the stranglehold of the traditional acquisition process.

Today, there is a veritable alphabet soup of incubators, accelerators, pathways and other mechanisms--DIU, AFWERX, RADR, MIU, ERDCW-ERX. Each service now has multiple mechanisms focused on different needs: acquiring mature commercial technologies, promoting early-stage research or bridging the various valleys of death between scienceand-technology and prototyping, or between prototyping and production.

It has reached a point where the effort to make it easier for the department to ingest innovative commercial technologies is becoming more difficult for the department, industry and Congress to comprehend.

"Most companies probably don't know how to navigate this," said Alexis Lasselle Ross, former deputy assistant secretary of the Army for strategy and acquisition reform and current president of Apex Defense Strategies, a firm that helps companies understand the ecosystem of acquisition pathways and programs.

The ecosystem is healthier today because there are more options and pathways for companies, she said. But not all the options are delivering for the department or companies, and it also puts a burden on companies to understand the system and determine what's the best fit. Are they trying to sell a technology, a weapon, or a software application? Are they looking for a contract or funding to mature a technology?

"You should kind of know going in what you're selling," which is a business fundamental, she said. "But we also need to line that up with the right acquisition approach."

Even when things align, many...