INNOVATION PATHWAYS

The Innovation Pathways website serves as a gateway for industry, small businesses, students, universities, and other organizations within the Department itself to discover opportunities with DoD organizations.
The Department of Defense manages a broad and diverse network of organizations and opportunities that offer a variety of resources to those who want to work with the Department. Though the aggregate capabilities of these organizations are significant, navigating to the right opportunity can be overwhelming, particularly for those approaching the process for the first time. The new website provides a user-friendly platform, segmented into three sections, one for businesses, one for students and academia, and one for DoD users. This design enables users to get the information and contacts they need in a streamlined manner.
The site is the result of work conducted by the Innovation Steering Group (ISG), an initiative created by Deputy Secretary Hicks and chaired by the Office of Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu as the Departments Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and has transitioned over to management by OUSD(R&E) in further partnership directly with OUSD(I&S).
As the challenges facing the Defense Intelligence and Security Enterprise (I&S) have never been more daunting. With revolutionary technological advances imminent, our intelligence and security organizations must both embrace developmental agility and seek out partnerships with external innovators. To that end, OUSD (I&S) has partnered with OUSD (R&E) to connect modernizers from industry and academia with intelligence and security practitioners who require technological innovation and can offer the resources to help develop and acquire it.
The department plans to continually update the Innovation Pathways website in an iterative and continual fashion to be responsive to user needs and technology advances.
Innovation Steering Group
The department's Innovation Steering Group, or ISG, serves as a forum to drive systemic strategy, policy, programmatic, cultural and budgetary changes that will allow the department to more effectively identify, to invest in and to transition capability to the warfighter chaired by OUSD(R&E) as the Departments Chief Technology Officer. The ISG features representatives across the department including the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the military services, combatant commands, and the Joint Staff. Inputs to the ISG feed into the Deputy’s Management Action Group (DMAG) by exception. This has included topics such as the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) which aims to expand multi-DoD component experimentation in a structured, multi-year campaign of learning to accelerate new capabilities to fill critical joint warfighting capability gaps.