The Defense Department’s experimental tech innovation hub established less than a year ago in Southern California will evolve into a bi-coastal nationwide enterprise with a permanent leadership structure and civilian and reserve personnel.
In his fourth visit to Silicon Valley since becoming secretary of defense, Ashton Carter on Wednesday in Mountain View, Calif, said the Defense Innovation Unit eXperimental (DIUx) made clear in eight months of operation that it was invaluable to the Pentagon doing business with the tech industry. Plans are to “iterate” and scale the experimental unit, including the establishment of an East Coast headquarters in Boston.
“We’re taking a page straight from the Silicon Valley playbook: We’re iterating rapidly to make DIUx even better,” Carter said. “Since creating DIUx, it has become even clearer to me how valuable this model is.”
The unit’s second iteration will be led by combat veteran National Guardsman and F-16 pilot and tech entrepreneur Raj Shah, who was given the title “managing partner,” and a number of tech executives pulled from commercial firms. Another senior partner, Isaac Taylor, was head of Google [GOOGL] X and worked on that company’s Google Glass initiative and self-driving car concept. The management team will report directly to the secretary of defense, a move which Carter said emphasizes the unit’s importance and his commitment to rapid decision making from the top down.
“The fast, iterative technology development that we all in this room take for granted must be applied to our most important national security issues,” Shah said during Wednesday’s ceremony. “From rapid acquisitions to targeted R&D to entrepreneur-in-residence efforts, we will take the secretary’s mandate and tangibly demonstrate to technology companies and entrepreneurs that the military can be an important and reliable partner and that companies have a special role to play using their ingenuity and technology to protect our country.”
The reserve unit, a first of its kind of which Carter did not specify a size, will be led by Navy Reserve Cmdr. Doug Beck, a decorated combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and out of uniform served as Apple’s [AAPL] vice president for the Americas.
“America’s reservists, our citizen soldiers, can provide unique value in this field, as they do in so many areas, given the fact that many of these patriots are tech-industry leaders when they are not on duty for us in DoD,” Carter said.
In the fiscal 2017 budget, an additional $30 million is set aside to be directed to “non-traditional” companies that are developing emerging technologies that show promise for military application. Carter said the funding amount is a starting point that will be added to by military service-specific investment.
“To channel these resources into systems that will give our future war fighters a battlefield advantage, DIUx will exercise all avenues, all avenues to fund promising technologies.”
Those avenues include merit-based prize competitions, “incubator” partnerships and targeted research and development efforts, he said.
Since its inception in April 2015, the DIUx team has made connections with more than 500 entrepreneurs and companies, hosted forums to connect the tech private sector with Defense Department officials and funding sources, fellowships and programs, Carter said. A dedicated funding pipeline has paid out to nearly 24 technology projects from wind-powered drones to data analytics.
“It has made great progress in putting commercially-based innovation in the hands of America’s sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines,” Carter said. “Now it’s time to build on that.”