{"id":27929,"date":"2021-01-11T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-11T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/uncategorized\/2021\/01\/11\/defense-innovation-unit-chief-on-keeping-the-office-relevant\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T22:17:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T22:17:40","slug":"defense-innovation-unit-chief-on-keeping-the-office-relevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/interviews\/2021\/01\/11\/defense-innovation-unit-chief-on-keeping-the-office-relevant\/","title":{"rendered":"Defense Innovation Unit chief on keeping the office relevant"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mike Brown, the managing director at the Defense Innovation Unit, explains his perspective on the Pentagon’s relationship with Silicon Valley.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 In August 2015, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter stood up a new, small office known as the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, or DiuX. The office\u2019s goal: to be the point of contact with the commercial technology world and bring that innovation into the Pentagon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four secretaries of defense and five years later, the office \u2014 which has since lost<\/a> the \u201cExperimental\u201d tag \u2014 is still going strong. Michael Brown, the former CEO of Symantec, took over the office<\/a> in September 2018. He talked with Defense News on Dec. 10 about the office\u2019s activities and upcoming efforts the Biden administration enters the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Defense Innovation Unit\u2019s job is two-fold: find new technologies from the commercial sector that are applicable for the Pentagon, and then transitioning them into service. The last part has, historically, been tricky. Five years in, how\u2019s it going?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The three-year average of transitioning projects from fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2019 was 35 percent. A lot of organizations would say, \u201cOK, well, that\u2019s good if you\u2019ve transitioned <\/a>a third,\u201d but we said that\u2019s not good enough. What we found when we took an in-depth look at what was happening was that about 40 percent of projects where the prototype was successful, there was another obstacle to getting in scaled; most often the Department of Defense partner or customer organization didn\u2019t have the money ready to scale it. So [we started thinking] what we need to do upfront when we plan a project before we even take it on \u2014 to be thinking about what is the transition plan, how do we write that production contract and is the money in place. And we\u2019ve already seen that transition rate kick up to 43 percent. I think we got every probability of getting that to about 50 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Commercial firms sometimes complain about the Pentagon being too slow. Have you been able to speed up the timeline?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our target there is 60-90 days to get on contract \u2014 one year for a software project and two years for a hardware project. We just had one of our key projects transition in record time, which was one year and a quarter. Another metric would be cost, we\u2019re using commercial technology, we\u2019re saving taxpayer dollars versus creating a bespoke solution. So our goal is to be able to save 10 times our budget. We haven\u2019t been able to do that every year, but we\u2019ve saved a few hundred million per year for the DoD, which is of course a multiple of our small budget. And then another metric we use is: How many new vendors are we bringing in? The reason we were set up is to make sure there\u2019s reach into the venture ecosystem, the innovation ecosystem, to make sure new capabilities are available to the DoD; so 65 first time vendors, and we\u2019re continuing to increase that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you expand the work DIU has already done?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you kind of zoom back and look at the macro picture, it\u2019s not about how big DIU can become \u2014 it\u2019s about how can we really have this flywheel go faster for getting more commercial technology adopted. So part of that is the budget flexibility \u2014 we need to move at a different speed than we have historically where it takes two years to plan the next dollar of spending. We have to move faster than that, given the competition that we see with what China\u2019s doing \u2014 bringing technology into its military. Of course China has the whole Military-Civil Fusion strategy. We\u2019ve got to basically address that by providing incentives, not by fiat. I don\u2019t want its system, but we both see that probably has some advantages in getting things done more quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another big factor in this flywheel \u2014 having the commercial world see the success of companies and projects so that they\u2019re interested in investing in our needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\t