How the DoD is Teaming Up with Small Businesses

By C. Todd Lopez

The Defense Department’s Office of Small Business Programs has several efforts underway to make it easier for the U.S. small business community to become more involved in providing goods, services, technology and research to support our nation’s defense.

At the Professional Services Council in Arlington, Virginia, Farooq A. Mitha, the director of the Office of Small Business Programs, spoke to representatives of small businesses about his office’s most recent efforts, including the department’s newly released Small Business Strategy.

About 96% of the department’s Procurement Technical Assistance Centers have been rebranded as APEX Accelerators in the past few months. Those APEX Accelerators have an enhanced mission of helping existing and new businesses strengthen the defense industrial base by accelerating innovation, fostering ingenuity and establishing resilient and diverse supply chains.

“We’re going to be doing a lot of market research using these entities,” Mitha said. “We’re going to connect them closer to our other prime contractors that are looking for subcontractors to be part of their supply chains.”

The APEX Accelerators will also do more training with small businesses on issues related to cybersecurity and foreign ownership, control or influence that might affect their ability to work with the federal government. Efforts are also underway to reinvigorate the Rapid Innovation Fund (RIF), which hasn’t been funded since 2019. That program was designed to help small businesses get their technology from the prototype stage to the production stage—a period when many companies fail, commonly called “the valley of death.”

“We’ve gone four years without money into this program,” Mitha noted. “That is a big, big problem at a time when we’re spending more dollars doing prototyping. We need to support more companies to go into production and transition their technologies.”

The RIF will support streamlining entry points into the defense marketplace for small companies and enable better long-term planning for small business programs. Recently, Mitha advocated for the permanency of the Mentor Protégé Program (MPP)—a pilot for over 30 years. This led to Congress making MPP permanent in the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.

Additionally, two new programs have been implemented under Mitha’s leadership: The Small Business Integration Group and a new credential with the Defense Acquisition University (DAU).

The Small Business Integration Group, under Mitha’s leadership, will include services, the defense agency, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the industrial base and small business stakeholders. This group will work together to form a stronger industry and communicate the needs amongst departments in a more organized fashion.

The DAU will also offer a new credential that will help anyone in the acquisition workforce earn their small business credential. Mitha says of the program, “We’ve now established common courses, curriculum and training for all these professionals. But we’ve made it a credential, not a career field. So, what that means is that anybody in the acquisition workforce can get the small business credential.”

Mitha said he expects more instructors and capacity will be needed to help the thousands of acquisition professionals across the department who may want to get the small business credential.

For more information on how the Office of Small Business Programs and the Department of Defense can help your business ventures, visit va.gov/osdbu.

Source: Department of Defense

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