Special Edition: Farooq Mitha on Commercializing Defense Innovation

Speaker A: Foreign. Hi, welcome to Emerging Technologies Horizon Podcast. I'm Stephanie Halcrow, visiting scholar at, um, Emerging Technologies Institute, or eti. I'm here today with Farouk Mistah, who is the president of Imbue Group and former director of the Office of Small Business Programs in the department. Thank you, Farooq, for being here with me. Uh, I know you have been an integral part of this conference for as long as it's been in existence. And today you actually moderated a, uh, technical presentation on allies and partners, which is like, right up your alley because in your business you actually do a lot of work in that. Can you talk to us about your presentation today? Or I should say the other presenters, kind of what their focus was on how it related to emerging technology and then what you do for your clients.

Speaker B: Yeah, no. First of all, thank you for having me. I'm really, really happy to be here. So, allies and partners, in terms of the technical session, really focused on some capabilities that have been developed and how they can either move the process forward of how we can share information with allies and partners, for example, classified information in an easier way, but also capabilities that are being developed in the autonomy space and how we can commoditize those capabilities, for example, for undersea, and share them with allies and partners. I think it really ties into this idea that the global challenges are increasing and we have to have interoperability with allies and partners. We have to be able to share capabilities. We have to be able to draw on their capabilities when they're producing technologies. Uh, that would be helpful to us here in the United States. Right now, I'm actually working with the UK Ministry of Defense. Uh, they came to me almost a year and a half ago and they said, hey, we're establishing our own small business office here.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: And they were like, how did you do it in the US and what should we be doing and can you help us do it? So I've been spending a lot of time in the UK and I've seen that there's a lot that we can share. Uh, as Americans, uh, we've got a lot of law, regulation, policy around, for example, small business related procurement and how we engage and develop a small business industrial base. And those are lessons that our allies are looking to learn from and adopt. Uh, the UK also has UK Defense innovation. They've had somebody from DIU in the US embedded with them. There's a lot of cross sharing of ideas and I think that will help us address these global challenges together. It'll help us to share knowledge I think we can still play a really important role there because a lot of countries have not been as focused. You know, my background is in industrial uh, policy related issues. But most recently as you said, I was running the small business office in the department and we just, a lot of countries that are our allies just don't have the same emphasis on how they can use government to grow a small business industrial base. And as these um, challenges are emerging, more and more countries are thinking about how do we do it, how do we commercialize technology, how do we grow our own innovation base, how do we bring private capital to the table like the, the US has done with the Office of Strategic Capital. So those are all the kind of things that I'm working with them on. It's been really fruitful to see um, that develop a new organization being stood up over there. And I see that across other areas where you know, Defenseworks is setting up something in uh, Denmark for example, and the Canadians are reaching out and seeing how they can develop their own industrial base. So there's a lot to be done there. And some of the presentations in the technical session, really we're talking about specific capabilities and how those could be also scaled or shared or can help facilitate the process a little bit easier.

Speaker A: I know I said this before um, to you in like some somewhat semi public ah, uh, environment but I was so impressed is your leadership of the small business programs office. Um, you really transformed how that office thinks about small businesses and connecting it to industrial base. And I'm really glad to see that transformation is continuing um, in the department. And so thank you, thank you for doing that once again. Um, and I'm also like just thrilled to hear that now you're working with other organizations to like take all those um, concepts and visions that you implemented and you know those best practices and share them with others. So this conference is all about emerging technologies, but you've been talking about small businesses and industrial base and how to bring that to the military because without those linkages, the emerging technologies just sit in the labs and they spin around and don't do anything. So tell me about those conversations that you're having with military, uh, either the United States or allies and partners about what are the best ways to operationalize that emerging tech.

Speaker B: I think the most important thing that everyone that I've talked to is either trying to figure out or they're a part of it is how do we commercialize technologies. And one example that the department is working on now is this defense patent holiday initiative where they're taking patents that are sitting on the shelf at times at labs that have been developed by scientists that work for the department. But how do we commercialize those capabilities? How do we put them in the hands of industry? So the department right now is offering no cost commercial evaluation licenses to these companies to take these patents and to do something with them so we can continue to advance the technologies and bring more emerging technologies to the forefront to support the war fighters, whether it's advanced materials or munitions or directed energy. How do we do that? And what I like about what the department is doing right now is they're putting dollars behind it through SBIR topics and really like seeding those phase one SBIR capabilities to do that work. That's one part of it. If you think about allies and partners, they're looking at the programs that we have here in the US and they're saying, hey, we love sbir. How do we do that? We love Defense Innovation Unit. How do we do that? We love Office of Strategic Capital and bringing private equity and how do we do that? So I think there's this big focus on commercialization around taking government investments and really bringing them to the forefront. And I'm not even. We haven't even scratched the surface of what's happening at universities that's funded both by the department and other federal agencies. So there's a lot happening there. And I think there's a realization that, uh, there's a lot of potential capabilities that are sitting on the shelf, for lack of a better word. We need to do more to incentivize industry, to take that and to run with it.

Speaker A: That's such an interesting concept. I've never really thought about it and I guess I wasn't aware of this program. So the department is saying, hey, at all of our labs we have done all this incredible research, um, government scientists and we have patents on, on really cool stuff, but nothing's ever been done with it because our government scientists don't necessarily have any incentive to do it. Or um, there's no commercialization as you mentioned.

Speaker B: And sometimes it's too hard, it's too hard to license the patent. So how do, how does the government make that easier? And then how can we use, or how can the government use emerging technologies like AI to actually help industry figure out like, and government figure out what's important? What do we care about as a nation? And how can those patents or other capabilities then be narrowed down to something that's operational? Or I guess, uh, maybe that's the wrong word. But something that can be commercialized to actually benefit and put in the hands of the warfighter.

Speaker A: So if I was an emerging tech company that, that had some specialty, but also had some room to look at other technology that other people had developed, how would I start thinking about, um, entering into this space?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think first is go to the department's website. If you go to the website for the Undersecretary for Research and Engineering, you'll see some really important programs. You'll see SBIR on the front page, the Small Business Innovation Research Program. You'll see the appfit program, Agile Procurement and Fielding Technologies. I always forget what the acronym stands for. And then you'll see this patent Holiday initiative. And these are the departments putting out there, like, what they're offering to industry. And when you go there, you'll see, like, what the opportunities are, how these programs work. And then we have, uh, in the government field offices across the country, you've got Apex accelerators, you've got Defense Innovation Unit organizations across the country. There are organizations that are out there that emerging technology companies can reach out to that are basically front doors for the department. And they can engage with them and learn more about some of these programs and how they can get involved, where they fit. The department sponsors so many, what are called partnership intermediaries through the Air Force, through socom, through other areas, and they're there to help industry, like, figure all this stuff out. So the resources are there, uh, the opportunities are there. I'm not going to say that it happens overnight. It takes a lot of patience, it takes a lot of persistence. But it's out there. And there's a big appetite right now to bring in emerging technology companies, non traditional companies, companies that are working on what is going to be the next 10, 20, 30 years of what we need to develop as a nation to support our war fighters.

Speaker A: That's awesome. Um, I'm going to call an audible on the questions that we discussed beforehand. Sure. So, as I mentioned, I love what you did in the small business, um, office. Like, I'm sure you had a grease board of all the things that you were trying to get through and initiatives that you're trying to implement. Um, what was still on the grease board when your tenure ended?

Speaker B: Oh, that's a controversial one. One of my biggest, biggest things I wanted to get done was, well, there's two things. One was to refund the Rapid Innovation Program. And I still believe to this day that we need multiple ways to pull technologies across the finish line to be able to field them. Um, uh, appfit's a great program. It's procurement dollars. The Rapid Innovation Fund, while it was funded, was, uh, RDTNE money. And it was really helped be another tool in the toolkit to bridge the valley of death for these SBIR and other emerging technology companies. Now, if you look at where money has gone over the past six, seven, eight years, there is so much more money going into prototyping. And you've got Defense Innovation Unit, you've got the various works organizations, you've got the, uh, uh, socom, uh, softworks type organizations. And we're spending so much RDT and E money on prototyping and developing capabilities. We still don't have enough tools to bring them over. So when I was still in the department, I really wanted to fund the program and get it into the President's budget. We came very, very close. But there's one thing that got left off the table. Uh, I still think there's an opportunity for future leaders to do it. There's still a need for it. It's a permanent program. So I'm hoping that somebody will bring that back to life. Uh, and also cyber security, we can talk a little bit more about that. Uh, but there's been a pause in CMMC Level 2 certification for a lot of good reason, by the way. But I still, uh, put a lot of time into industrial cybersecurity when I was in the department because we need to protect our networks in industry, the government needs to protect their networks. And as emerging technologies like AI develop, we don't know who's going to be outpacing who. And we're going to have a lot more speed, uh, in terms of how threats are developed. And you've seen even rogue AI hacking things that have happened, uh, in the private sector. And I think the department needs to be concerned about that. I think the defense industrial base needs to be concerned about that. And those things are going to be moving at a much faster pace. So I put a lot of time into that. We got really far, but I think there's so much more work to do there.

Speaker A: And so you're here last year, you're here this year, next year. What do you want to be talking about next year?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. There's a couple things that I think, uh, are on my mind. One is critical minerals. Uh, there is, there are NDAA DFARS provisions that are going to kick in January of 2027. And I do some work around these issues as well. In My current, some of my current work, uh, that I'm doing and I don't know that really industry or the department is ready uh, to say that we're gonna have companies need domestic sources. I think the current administration has done a good job of making the investments uh, in critical mineral companies to start uh, to onshore those capabilities. But these things are really being adopted at sub tier supply levels where sometimes even primes don't understand, larger primes don't know um, where these, what the sources are. And I think that there could be the use of emerging technologies to make that easier to use AI to come up with new ways of even addressing uh, environmental concerns that might make it hard for a domestic based company to get permits for example to onshore those capabilities. So then we're going to start thinking about how do we address those issues and uh, what role does technology play in it to make sure that we're not just rinse and repeating what's happening in China or somewhere else in terms of processing, but how are we doing it better, more efficiently, more affordably so we can do it here.

Speaker A: And I love your concept of like hey, how are we using emerging technologies with this concept of strategic and critical materials? Because it's not just about like replacing what we get from someplace else with something that we get from here. But maybe there's a thought about like maybe we can use something different.

Speaker B: Yes,

Speaker A: there

Speaker B: are companies thinking about those.

Speaker A: Yes. And so that's where I think in emerging it'd be cool,

Speaker B: it would be cool to have a session here just on that and

Speaker A: bring

Speaker B: those companies to the forefront,

Speaker A: say what else

Speaker B: are you doing and how are you doing?

Speaker A: I love that, you

Speaker B: know, and also cybersecurity, I think industrial cybersecurity I think should become a bigger focus for all the reasons that I said. Our adversaries, non state actors as AI is bringing more to speed, uh threats, we gotta be ready to adapt and we need to protect our intellectual property in this country and we need to make sure that our government at the department is protecting all of the important information that's there and who knows what the next cyber attack could be and how AI could play a role in that. Right. So I think we need to really be in convenings like this thinking more about those issues as well.

Speaker A: Farouk, thanks so much for all your comments. I mean you talked about everything from cybersecurity to mining. I mean what great conversation again. I just have so much respect and admiration for what you have done and what you continue to do. Thank you. Thanks for sitting down with me. I know we've been trying to get it for a long, long time and. But we finally did it. Thank

Speaker B: you. Well, I'll tell you one thing that is, uh, something that people may not understand about the small business director job and in the department is you. And we kind of touched on this. Small businesses make up a very large part of the industrial base. I would say in my mind it's like 90%. And what happens is when you're in a job like that, you really have to be able to navigate a lot of different issues. So, you know, when I was in the department, one day I'm like, literally in Puerto Rico visiting textile manufacturers that are like, I've got fixed price contracts, there's inflation. I can't do business with you guys at the Department of Defense and still make money. I'm going to go out of business. So I got to figure out how to help them. And then the next day I'm meeting with like, uh, AI or like robotics company, and they're talking about something completely different. So you have to be you, yet you can't fake it. You got to be somewhat well versed, at least a couple inches deep in all these different topics. And it was fun. It was a great experience because it really enabled me to learn so much from all these companies that are doing really amazing work. And then like now on the outside, I'm able to work with some of them and help them think through, like, where are the opportunities? How do I figure out how this big complex system called the Department of Defense or Department of War, how does it all work and what are the entry points? And I think having that inside experience, I'm so appreciative of it because of everything that I learned then. Being able to take that and work with either industry here, but also with our allies and help them figure out how they can do some of the things that we really have mastered here over the last 40 or 50 years, uh, it's been really rewarding.

Speaker A: Well, you're doing a great job and I look forward to watching your continued success. Thank

Speaker B: you.

Speaker A: Thanks, Farouk. Appreciate it.