The world of R&D is full of collaboration. R&D Magazine has seen this directly through some of the winners of the R&D 100 awards in the past. However, not only is collaboration important to the world of R&D, but it is essentially important to all aspects of life. For the Army, it is not different.

Located on the Picatinny Applied Research Campus (PARC) at the US Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, InSitech is a non-profit foundation that fosters business relationships between the military and the high-tech business community across the whole country and globally. With a focus on private-sector technology businesses, InSitech “helps companies who are interested in collaborating with the Army get their technology noticed by the scientists and engineers who have a problem it may help solve,” says Alex Cocoziello, director of business development at InSitech.

Picatinny Arsenal has 64 unique labs on base with over 2,400 scientists and engineers that work within the arsenal’s walls. It is a 6,500 acre site where mission- related, private-sector companies can establish their own facilities in the PARC. Essentially, “InSitech is involved in sourcing companies to work with the military,” says Cocoziello.

InSitech is helping to address the Dept. of Defense’s recommendation to emphasize competitive prototypes, conduct technology demonstrations, and establish prospects for “commercial and foreign technologies, and encourage dual use technology,” states Cocoziello. InSitech’s serves as an intermediary between non-traditional private-sector suppliers and the government with the goal of finding dual use technologies that enhance the technologies already used by the Army.

InSitech is currently looking to foster these non-traditional, but needed, relationships through certain topics of interests stipulated by the Arsenal. “We are on contract with the Army to look for solutions in 12 different areas of interest that span a number of different technologies,” states Cocoziello. These areas include:

• Lasers which will improve target designation and further reduce the possibility of collateral damage;
• Batteries/power/energy—in particular energy harvesting—such as taking energy from the heat and vibrational energy generated when a soldier users a rifle and transferring the energy to power other electronics used by the soldier.;
• Guidance navigation and control;
• Advanced electronic components that will improve the reliability of advanced munitions while making more space available for the warhead and other components. This holds a focus on miniaturization of fuze electronics inside the warhead.
• Radios and communications;
• Advanced materials for sensors and transducers; and
• Non-toxic anti-corrosive coatings that do not utilize hex chrome, in the manufacturing process.

So, why not collaborate with national or government labs? Cocoziello states, “We do not preclude the labs, and do actually work with them, but our mission as a partnership intermediary is to conduct the outreach to the non-traditional commercial markets. The Army has a lot of activity and great collaboration with the DOE (Dept. of Energy) laboratories for military technology through their own internal structures. We complement that by reaching out to the companies or communities that don’t have standing relationships with the Army, but do have high technology that is relevant. However, in fact, academia and the DOE labs are definitely part of our outreach.”

Small companies and businesses interested in any of these areas or collaborating with InSitech and the Army can respond to an RFI on www.tech-rfi.org.The deadline for submission is March 12.

InSitech and the Army are greatly looking forward to learning about the applicable technologies the private R&D sector has to contribute.