Last year, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) celebrated its seventh year of accelerating commercial technology adoption across the Department of Defense (DoD). Launched as an experiment in 2015, DIU is now a proven business model for prototyping and acquiring leading-edge technology. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2022, DIU successfully transitioned 17 technology solutions to defense and civilian agency end-users, equating to $1.3B in contract award ceiling. The volume of transitions in FY 2022 is also the greatest we have seen in a single fiscal year, and more than double the eight transitions we saw in FY 2021.
The core of DIU operations continues to be fueled by our Commercial Solutions Opening process leveraging the Other Transaction “OT” authority, and a commitment to being a “fast follower” of commercial technology. In fact, we provided $4.9 B of total value in production OT contract ceiling to commercial companies since 2016, including most to nontraditional and first-time DoD customers.
Our portfolios focus on leveraging technology from six areas: autonomy, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, cyber, energy, human systems, and space to enable a modern and agile Joint Force.
Many of the wins from FY 2022 are a credit to the steady and ambitious leadership of Mike Brown, whose four years at the helm saw many accomplishments of impact, scale and thought leadership. We owe much of where we are today as an organization to his hard work and vision.
As we move further along into FY 2023, DIU remains dedicated to accelerating commercial solutions to our DoD and U.S. government partners, strengthening our national security innovation base by lowering the barriers to entry and providing recurring revenue to non-traditional companies. I hope this FY 2022 Annual Report conveys the breadth and depth of our work and the positive effect we, as an organization, on our national security.
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