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Title: The US Navy Is More Aggressively Telling Startups, 'We Want You'

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/16/2046...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: While Silicon Valley
executives like those from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are grabbing headlines
for trading their Brunello Cucinelli vests for Army Reserve uniforms, a
quieter transformation has been underway in the U.S. Navy. How so? Well, the
Navy's chief technology officer, Justin Fanelli, says he has spent the last
two and a half years cutting through the red tape and shrinking the
protracted procurement cycles that once made working with the military a
nightmare for startups. The efforts represent a less visible but potentially
more meaningful remaking that aims to see the government move faster and be
smarter about where it's committing dollars. "We're more open for business
and partnerships than we've ever been before," Fanelli told TechCrunch in a
recent episode of StrictlyVC Download. "We're humble and listening more than
before, and we recognize that if an organization shows us how we can do
business differently, we want that to be a partnership." Right now, many of
these partnerships are being facilitated through what Fanelli calls the
Navy's innovation adoption kit, a series of frameworks and tools that aim to
bridge the so-called Valley of Death, where promising tech dies on its path
from prototype to production. "Your granddaddy's government had a spaghetti
chart for how to get in," Fanelli said. "Now it's a funnel, and we are
saying, if you can show that you have outsized outcomes, then we want to
designate you as an enterprise service." In one recent case, the Navy went
from a Request for Proposal (RFP) to pilot deployment in under six months
with Via, an eight-year-old, Somerville, Massachusetts-based cybersecurity
startup that helps big organizations protect sensitive data and digital
identities through, in part, decentralization, meaning the data isn't stored
in one central spot that can be hacked. (Another of Via's clients is the U.S.
Air Force.) The Navy's new approach operates on what Fanelli calls a
"horizon" model, borrowed and adapted from McKinsey's innovation framework.
Companies move through three phases: evaluation, structured piloting, and
scaling to enterprise services. The key difference from traditional
government contracting, Fanelli says, is that the Navy now leads with
problems rather than predetermined solutions. "Instead of specifying, 'Hey,
we'd like this problem solved in a way that we've always had it,' we just
say, 'We have a problem, who wants to solve this, and how will you solve
it?'" Fanelli said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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