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2019 Army Law. 44 (2019)
Government Communication with Industry: More Necessary Now than Ever

handle is hein.journals/armylaw2019 and id is 206 raw text is: (Credit: istockphoto.com/metamorworks) Government Communication with Industry More Necessary Now Than Ever By Lieutenant Colonel Alan M. Apple The times they are a-changin' Bob Dylan Today is a new day. Gone are the days where the U.S. government dominates the dollars spent to create significant techno- logical innovation. In 2017, Amazon and Google combined to spend over S38.2 bil- lion for research and development, which is an increase of S9 billion from 2016.' This may seem significantly lower than the S58.3 billion invested by the Department of Defense (DoD), or the S133 billion spent by the entire federal government, however, it is important to consider that overall business investment in research and development in the United States accounted for S347.7 billion.2 In fact, busi- ness research and development investment has been outpacing government invest- ment since 1981 and is skyrocketing while government spending has flattened. To compound matters, U.S. rivals like China have increased research and development spending over seventy percent in the last five years and some believe that their spending will surpass the United States this year.4 This presents a dilemma for the U.S. government: how to maintain an advantage on potential adversaries without dominating research and development investment? To stay ahead of our adversaries, the government must continuously com- municate with industry to understand the current state of the art technology or current innovation and use it to help inform requirements in order to maximize DoD capability and readiness. In support of that effort, the government must limit its reliance on tribal knowledge' and use market research to inform requirement development. It must also take adequate measures to ensure that communication with industry and market research do nothing to reduce the competitive field of offerors, impair the acquisition timeline, or result in avoidable protests while taking every opportunity to communicate with industry and learn of its innovation. Limiting Reliance on Tribal Knowledge Tribal knowledge is sometimes known as the collective wisdom and capabilities of the people within a group. It can be great for keeping a competitive edge. As long as the collective group of people you are using for a specific purpose know more than everyone else and can somehow harness that knowledge to stay ahead in the development of that knowledge, there are few issues. Unfortunately, we live in an era where more people have access to informa- tion and technology which results in more sources of innovation than ever before. As such, the potential for significant innova- tion and development from outside of the government is higher than ever. These changin' times require a para- digm shift that recognizes and incorporates the fact that private industry is a source of significant innovation that will give the U.S. government advantage over their adver- saries. Accordingly, it is imperative that government organizations stay informed of industry innovation and harness its benefits. The Importance of Staying Informed of Innovation Defining mission requirements based on the limits of tribal knowledge can be problematic. If innovation is occurring outside of your organization, then your organization is probably lagging behind these advancements. Thus, you must stay informed of the innovation to acquire or use its benefits to articulate or define a command or agency requirement. Granted, many government require- ments require little outside knowledge such as: custodial services, general construction, dining facility service, and, sometimes, security services. However, even among Army Lawyer * Practice Notes * Issue 3 * 2019 44