U.S. General Services Administration
GSA Announces Award of Agency’s First Small Business Innovation Research Program Phase III Contracts
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) today announced it has made two awards through its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase III pilot program. The awards, a $150 million award made to The Perduco Group in support of the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Development Planning & Experimentation Office (SDPE) and a $2.2 million award made to Discovery Machine Inc. (DMI) in support of the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command (AETC), were made on September 28 and September 29, 2018 respectively.
The SBIR program is a highly competitive awards-based program coordinated by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) that encourages domestic small businesses to pursue research/research and development (R/R&D) projects that support government programs and have a strong potential for commercialization. The program is structured in three phases; Phases I and II focus on R/R&D, while Phase III brings the results of that R/R&D federal customers and the commercial market. GSA announced its pilot program, which will only award and manage SBIR Phase III contracts, earlier this year.
“GSA’s SBIR pilot allows GSA to improve the ways agencies buy, build, and use technology by delivering cutting-edge solutions to our partner agencies,” said GSA Administrator Emily Murphy. “This collaborative approach allows us to help agencies across the federal government commercialize solutions that were developed through the SBIR program. I’m proud of GSA’s assisted acquisition team’s work on this pilot as we continue to find ways to help our partner agencies reap the benefits of their early investment in small business research and development while supporting our nation’s technological and industrial bases.”
The award made to The Perduco Group builds off of SBIR Phase I work completed in support of SBIR Topic A17-107 (Systematic Trade-Off Strategies for Balancing Survivability and Mobility in Vehicle Design) by the U.S. Army Contracting Command and administered by the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA). The project will support the Air Force’s development of an infrastructure roadmap to enable an efficient, effective enterprise modeling, simulation and analysis (MS&A) capability to support acquisition tradespace exploration and assessment challenges. Specifically, the Air Force intends to extend the technology developed in the Phase I project to help address critical analysis gaps and increase the rigor of Air Force and U.S. Department of Defense resourcing decisions through enhanced capabilities in five key MS&A areas: tools, data, people processes, and partnerships (TDP3).
The award made to DMI will advance work performed under previously awarded SBIR II contracts to bring a more complete virtual instructor pilot (VIPER) solution to the Air Force AETC’s Pilot Training Next (PTN) program. The project supports the Air Force’s exploration of a pilot training environment that integrates immersive technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, enabling student pilots to practice maneuvers on their own.
Awards made through GSA’s SBIR Phase III pilot, which will run through September 2019, are made and managed by GSA’s Office of Assisted Acquisition Services.
About GSA
The mission of the U.S. General Services Administration is to deliver value and savings in real estate, acquisition, technology, and other mission-support services across government. One of its four strategic objectives is to establish GSA as the premier provider of efficient and effective acquisition solutions across the government.
About SBIR
The SBIR program was established in statute by the Small Business Innovation Development Act of 1982 (P.L. 97-219) and has subsequently been reauthorized by Congress on several occasions over the past 36 years.
The SBIR program is structured in three phases. The objective of Phase I is to establish the technical merit, feasibility, and commercial potential of the proposed research/research & development (R/R&D) efforts and to determine the quality of performance of the small business awardee organization prior to providing further federal support in Phase II. The objective of Phase II is to continue the R/R&D efforts initiated in Phase I. The objective of Phase III, where appropriate, is for the small business to pursue commercialization objectives resulting from the Phase I/II R/R&D activities.
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