The Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP) of the Department of Defense has several efforts made to make it easier for the nation’s small business community to be more involved in providing goods, services, technology and research in support of national defense.
Farooq A. Mitha, Director of OSBP, spoke Wednesday at the Professional Services Council in Arlington, Virginia. He told small business representatives about his office’s latest efforts including the Department’s newly released Small Business Strategy.
In the past few months, Mitha said, the department’s Procurement Technical Assistance Centers, about 96 of them across the country, have been rebranded as APEX Accelerators.
Those APEX Accelerators have an enhanced mission to help existing and new businesses strengthen the defense industry base by accelerating innovation, fostering creativity and establishing strong and diverse supply chains.
“We will do a lot of market research using these entities,” Mitha said. “We will connect them closer to our other main contractors who are looking for subcontractors to be part of their supply chains.”
APEX Accelerators will also provide additional training to small businesses on issues related to cybersecurity and foreign ownership, control or influence that may affect their ability to work with the federal government, Mitha said.
Efforts are also underway to revitalize the Rapid Innovation Fund, Mitha said. That program is designed to help small businesses get their technology from the prototype stage to the production stage — a period of time when many businesses fail often referred to as the “valley of death.”
The RIF hasn’t been funded since 2019, and Mitha said he intends to change that.
“We’ve been without money in this program for four years,” he said. “That’s a big, big problem at a time when we’re spending a lot of dollars doing prototyping. We need to support more companies going into production and transferring their technologies.”
Mitha said he is returning the RIF to his office to support streamlining defense market entry points for small companies and to enable better long-term planning for small business programs. Recently, Mitha advocated for the permanence of the Mentor Protégé Program (MPP), which has been a pilot for over thirty years. This led to Congress making MPP permanent in the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.
Another effort, Mitha said, is the creation of what he said is called the “Small Business Integration Group.” Not all efforts aimed at promoting small businesses are in his own office, he said, but the new group will combine efforts that take place outside his office.
“[It] bring the services, the defense agencies, OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense]the industry base and small business stakeholders to be part of a unified integration team that I will oversee … so that we can work together better, work closer together, communicate with the industry better, and break there are really silos between our programs,” he said.
The Defense Acquisition University trains the acquisition workforce from across the department, and Mitha said a new credential for working with small businesses has been established within the DAU.
“We have now developed common courses, curricula and training for all these professionals,” he said. “But we’re making it a credential that’s not a career field. So, what that means is that any of the hiring workers can get that small business credential.”
Mitha said he expects more instructors and capacity will be needed to help the thousands of hiring professionals across the department who want to earn the small business credential.
