National Security Innovation Network

Abstract

NSIN executes the following programs and pilot activities, all of which are designed to enhance DoD’s access to technologists and entrepreneurs for the purposes of improving its talent pool, enable collaboration with universities and the early-stage venture community to develop novel concepts and solutions for end-user problems and requirements, and prototype and test new technologies to place them on the path to becoming programs of record or integrated with existing platforms. • Technology and National Security Fellowship: a national, one-year fellowship pilot that places STEM graduates into the immediate offices of policymakers in Congress and the Pentagon for the purposes of enhancing technical literacy and improving policy outcomes through an informed understanding of emerging and nascent technologies. • X-Force Fellowship: a summer fellowship experience for current students that embeds project-based teams of graduate and undergraduate students with DoD mission partners for the purposes of developing early-stage prototypes. Occurs annually from June-August. • Hacking for Defense: a course taught at universities around the country that pairs DoD end-users with top university students for collaborative problem-solving over the course of an academic semester. Students work to develop a minimum viable product solution to improve the real-world problems of service members that can be adopted by the DoD end-users. • Bootcamp: a national program that provides crowd-sourced solutions for DoD mission partners by deploying faculty from top-tier research universities to bases and installations to facilitate early-stage concepts for technology and policy-based problems. • Maker: a national program that offers rapid prototyping for solutions drawn from accepted novel solution concepts from NSIN programming, allowing customers to turn ideas from the abstract and theoretical into practical and real prototypes. • Capstone: a national program that pairs prototyping development needs for DoD mission partners with extant engineering capstone courses from top-tier research universities throughout the country. Outputs include TRL-4 prototypes that can undergo testing and evaluation. • Forge/Foundry: a national program that identifies breakthrough DoD and other USG lab technology and leverages it to solve the real-world problems of DoD and commercial customers. Teams of entrepreneurs (Foundry) or ventures (Forge), working with DoD lab scientists and technologists, assess the market viability and the potential to commercialize DoD lab technologies. • Propel: a national program that partners with commercial accelerators to sponsor particularly promising technology and early-stage ventures into cohort-based customer discovery that improves DoD end-user validation. • Challenges: NSIN Challenges bring collaborators from the defense, academic, and venture communities to work on the most challenging technical problems in national security. • Emerge: a national program that identifies extant university IP, matches it against DoD mission partner needs, and then commercializes the technology through entrepreneurial training, recruitment, and licensing agreements. • Fulcrum: a pilot program that enables access to critical infrastructure that can be used to accelerate the development of solutions by early stage ventures. • Dual-Use Fundamentals: A pilot program delivering dual-use fundamental curriculum to early stage ventures.

Document Details

• Document Type: Project
• Publication Date: Oct 01, 2024
• Source ID: 845_0603950D8Z_3_0400_PB_2024

Tags

Readers

• Defense Technology Research and Development.
• STEM Education