Northrop Grumman lab designed to help small businesses

Northrop Grumman has built an advanced research and development lab at its offices in Colorado Springs as part of an effort to get new technologies developed by small businesses into the hands of military and other government agencies more quickly.

The 2-month-old lab, which has not yet been used, makes available to small businesses state-of-the-art information-technology equipment connected to Northrop Grumman’s internal network and uses the same computing architecture as the major commands in the Colorado Springs area.

Small businesses can use the lab to look at, experiment with and test how their technology will work in existing military programs. They also can tap expertise from Northrop Grumman employees working on contracts with local commands.

Northrop Grumman hosted a workshop with the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce last month at the lab to recruit small businesses to use the facility. By attracting more small business, the company hopes to spur competition among computer-hardware and -software vendors that likely will bring down costs and make its bids on military contracts more competitive, said Mike Schissel, the lab’s program manager.

The local lab was designed by Applied Minds, a company started by two former Walt Disney “imagineers” that provides technology, design, and research and development services to many major defense contractors and technology giants.

The lab includes a small data center filled with servers as well as a theaterlike meeting room with multiple display screens that is shielded to prevent electronic eavesdropping.

The lab is designed to help small businesses take technologies developed with Small Business Innovation Research grants and integrate them into existing contracts with the Department of Defense and other federal agencies. Under the program, federal agencies with research budgets of more than $100 million must reserve 2.5 percent of those funds for grants to small businesses.

The grants include six-month awards of up to $100,000 to study the feasibility or merit of a technology and up to $750,000 for up to two years to evaluate the potential for commercialization.

Little recent information is available on how many of the technologies make it off the drawing board. A 2005 study found that 22 percent of the grants from one agency had resulted in products, processes or services that were still in use at the time of the study.

“Small businesses build a lot of things under SBIR in isolation that can’t find a home” once the technology is ready to move into the marketplace, said Lee Whitt, technical director of the company’s small-business program for engineering, experimentation and deployment based in San Diego.

“Nobody wants a bunch of stand-alone applications that don’t integrate into existing programs. Suffice to say there aren’t many successes.”

Giving Northrop Grumman program managers an early look at new technologies makes it more likely that those technologies will be incorporated into existing contracts and programs, Whitt said.

Allowing small businesses to test their technologies in a real-world environment also reduces risk that the technologies won’t work and should make those technologies available for use in existing programs more quickly, he said.

The Colorado Springs lab is the second opened by the company; the first opened in San Diego in 2009 as part of an effort to find small-business vendors for a contract Northrop Grumman is seeking to upgrade onboard networks on the Navy’s fleet. The company won a $17.4 million contract last year to develop technology for the upgrade, but the award can grow to $775 million if all options through 2014 are exercised.

Northrop Grumman started the small-business program a few months after opening the San Diego lab and used the lab to demonstrate technologies developed by four small businesses to be used for the Navy contract.

At least 10 small businesses are using the San Diego lab, and Northrop Grumman is working with even more small firms to bid on contracts that are reserved, or set aside, for small businesses, Whitt said.

“We recognized the lab had much more value than using it for just one project and that the real value was offering its capabilities to small businesses that don’t have the resources to build an extensive information technology infrastructure,” Whitt said.

“We offer the lab to small business so they can bring their (technology) for experimentation and engineering and then can be developed as components of command and control systems.”

The Colorado Springs lab was originally designed to seek small-business partners for a bid Northrop Grumman was planning on a contract to upgrade Air Force Space Command’s space situational awareness capabilities. But the program was canceled last month.

The company plans to use the lab to help small businesses bid on contracts with Space Command, U.S. Northern Command, the North American Aerospace Defense Command and other area commands, said Pat Mills, a program manager for a Northrop Grumman unit that operates the lab.
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Call the writer at 636-0234.

TO LEARN MORE: Contact Mike Schissel, program manager for the lab, at 393-8266 or michael.schissel@ngc.com