Air Force Launches New Innovation Website

The Air Force's Office of Transformational Innovation launched its new website last Thursday, which not only touts its acquisition strategy success, but acknowledges its failures.

"Our focus really is on trying stuff out," Dr. Camron Gorguinpour, director of transformational innovation, said Sept. 15 at the Air Force Association's annual conference in National Harbor, MD. "We're not so policy or guidance driven, so I pitch ourselves as a Skunk Works for bureaucrats."

Through a "fail fast" method, OTI is burning through acquisition strategies in six months or less. Those failures are listed on OTI's website under its "Not Easy" button and includes its matchmaker project. The experiment found $2 billion in savings with the Space-Based Infrared Radar System, but struggled to identify other programs in suitable phases to match with an industry partner, according to Gorguinpour.

Gorguinpour's office is also spearheading the Air Force's Bending the Cost Curve initiative, which began as a push to reduce the time to award contracts. Since then, the initiative has evolved to include projects that will improve the internal acquisition processes, enhance industry interaction over the acquisition life cycle and reach out to companies outside the traditional defense industry orbit.