Immersive Program Arms DOD, Builds Acquisition Professionals' Innovation Skills

The Defense Department is looking for the next cohort of acquisition professionals seeking to expand their careers with the tools and insights needed to harness commercial technology innovation. 

Applications for the fiscal year 2025 Immersive Commercial Acquisition Program - a 12-month immersive fellowship offered in collaboration between the Defense Innovation Unit and Defense Acquisition University - are open through early August. 

The two organizations launched ICAP in 2022 after recognizing the need to keep pace with commercial product cycles and adopt best practices for commercial procurement within DOD.  

The program combines virtual classroom training and experiential learning covering other transaction, or OT, authorities through DAU's Defense Acquisition Credentials program.  

Those authorities provide federal contracting officers with the flexibility needed to leverage cutting edge commercial technologies offered by nontraditional defense contractors.  

Participants also gain experience on leveraging DIU's Commercial Solutions Opening, or CSO, process and receive first-hand knowledge of the commercial sector.  

"To meet the strategic imperative we face as a nation, the DoD needs innovation-fluent contracting officers and dual-fluency talent across the workforce," said DIU Director Doug Beck. "The experience and skills these fellows are learning is essential to complementing the DoD's more traditional defense acquisition pathways with disruptive tech-sector innovation with the focus, speed and scale required."

Cohorts work alongside a DIU contracting officer and project team and commercial solutions providers on a variety of projects.  

The program was designed around four key goals: 

• Educate and provide top DOD contracting officers with experience on how to effectively acquire innovative commercial technologies from nontraditional defense contractors.
• Provide experience and insight into how the commercial market operates and what drives an organization to do business with the government and DOD.  
• Empower change agents and arm contracting officers with the relevant tools and knowledge to craft acquisition, contracting and negotiation strategies that can effectively incorporate commercial technology and nontraditional vendors into DOD's acquisition ecosystem.  
• Furnish organizations with trained contracting officers who can also train others to be fluent in the innovation ecosystem and network with their counterparts in other service components. 

"Each year the ICAP program continues to set a high bar for future cohorts and achieves - and exceeds - our goal to provide innovation-fluent contracting officers," said DIU's Acquisition Director Cherissa Tamayori.  

"We are excited to continue to provide the environment to learn firsthand how to leverage the OT authority, how to acquire novel commercial technologies - and to have ICAP fellows be change agents in the use of flexible acquisition methods within their organizations," she said.  

DIU and DAU recognized the first cohort to complete the program last October. The current cohort of acquisition professionals is expected to complete their capstone projects in the coming months. 

As this year's ICAP reached the halfway point, participants emphasized the value of the program in enhancing their careers as acquisitions professionals and further propelling innovation within DOD.  

"As an ICAP fellow, my eyes have been opened to an entirely new way of doing business that I had no idea was even authorized," said Brittany Harris, a senior procurement analyst for the Air Force Installation Contracting Center, in an interview for Defense Acquisition Magazine.    

"Alternative authorities and CSOs are the way of the future in federal acquisition," she said. 

Tianna Seaman, a contracting officer at the Naval Information Warfare Center, said participating in ICAP has provided exposure to the strategic objectives of both the department and the commercial sector and underscored the importance of keeping end results in mind throughout the acquisition process. 

"DIU and their defense mission partners are breaching innovation in a manner never seen before in the DOD," Seaman said. "For companies, the goal is not just obtaining the prototype agreement; rather, it is putting their best and brightest teams on the projects at the best competitive prices to win the prototype, successfully completing the prototype, and noncompetitively entering into another agreement for full-scale production." 

"The end state for both the companies and DOD is obtaining those production agreements to scale the technologies and provide the innovative solutions to the warfighter," she said. 

Program administrators will competitively select up to six contracting officers for the next iteration of the program set to begin in October 2024.  

The opportunity is open to DOD civilians and military professionals.  

For more information: 

https://www.diu.mil/work-with-us/immersive-commercial-acquisition-program-icap