Air Force officials will be criss-crossing the country over the next two months as it has scheduled nearly a dozen opportunities for small businesses to pitch new, innovative ideas to the service and get on contract and paid on the spot before the end of 2019.
The service’s Small Business Innovative Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) is partnering on 11 events around the country, where over 300 previously approved startups and small businesses will present their concepts and solutions. Ten are scheduled in November and one will take place in December, per the service. The Air Force launched its inaugural pitch day this past March in New York, where it provided contracts to 51 companies for a total of around $8.75 million.
The topics for the next 11 pitch days span the Air Force’s portfolio and are largely located in cities and areas that relate to that topic. A space-related pitch day will be held Nov. 5-6 in San Francisco that specifically seeks ideas for launch systems, data mining, space visualization and space communications, while a hypersonics event will take place Nov. 7 in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, and focuses on finding “innovative technologies and/or processes that could increase hypersonic systems capabilities.”
The Air Force will return to San Francisco Nov. 13-14 for a rapid sustainment pitch day where innovative technologies and processes that could decrease operations and sustainment costs, or increase readiness, will be sought.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio will host several pitch days Nov. 13-14, as the host base for Air Force Materiel Command and the headquarters of the Air Force Small Business Office at the Lifecycle Management Center. A fighter/bomber-specific event there is looking for cyber-related commercial innovations to improve the aircraft in that portfolio, while a mobility and training aircraft event will seek solutions related to aircraft maintenance and manufacturing technologies, to include digital technologies.
The Air Force will also host an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and Special Forces (SOF) pitch day at Wright-Patt at that time, along with an airborne communications event looking for ways to improve comms systems, protect intellectual property and integrate additive manufacturing processes into current sustainment efforts. An Air Force Technical Executive Officer day Nov. 15 at Wright-Patt is looking for solutions to help with highlighting Phase II contracts that are about to transition with matching customer funding.
Two pitch days will take place Nov. 21: One in Washington, D.C., will focus on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and particularly ideas that include “Artificial Intelligence for the optimization of air system acquisition enterprises, Machine Learning for the optimization of air system acquisition enterprises [and] Data analytics tools for the optimization of air system acquisition enterprises.”
The second that day will take place in Panama City, Florida, seeking ideas that will help the service flesh out its “Base of the Future” concepts to help inform new and innovative facility design and construction, energy efficiency, force protection, urbanization, information technology efforts and more.
Finally, the Air Force will meet companies Dec. 3-5 in Orlando, Florida, to search for innovative solutions in simulator technologies.
The companies who will participate in these pitch days have previously passed through the Air Force’s Open Innovation Topic Phase I effort, but more opportunities will arrive in 2020, the service said. The Defense Department’s SBIR/STTR office issues calls for proposals three times a year on its website.