Offset Symposium - Accelerated Access to Innovation

To restore its comparative advantage against emergent threats and offset force shortfalls, the U.S. Defense Department seeks strategic investments, creative partnerships and agile mechanisms to facilitate the rapid integration of promising and potent technologies. Like the offset strategies before it, the Third Offset Strategy combines the creative energies of industry and government to augment the United States' capability and capacity to defend the nation. The department requires access, scale and speed in its search for broader solutions. Leveraging advancements in areas such as advanced computing and cyber, autonomy, cognition, big data and quantum science requires new paths to industry. Substantial advances are being made in commercial innovation hubs such as Silicon Valley, often driven by market forces outside the federal sector such as financial services and health care. 

Accelerating access to innovation depends on better contact and communication. Government buyers with compelling problems must connect with ready companies and credible solutions. Process must not hamper progress. There must be deliberate engagement across the driving engines behind this innovation: the venture capital (VC) community, defense industry innovators, DARPA and the military services’ labs, as well as academia and the wider innovation ecosystem. Despite the Pentagon’s reduced power as an independent market force, the national security community still offers unique benefits that are attractive to industry, VCs and academia, including non-dilutive capital (In-Q-Tel), challenging problem sets, experimentation and technology validation.

The Offset Symposium promotes constructive engagement between these groups and the national security community to accelerate discovery of and access to technologies and to build new business relationships.