Virginia Tech to lead DoD’s new Acquisition Innovation and Research Center

Center to focus on acquisition system efficiency

Published March 5, 2021 by Sydney Lake

Laura Freeman. Photo courtesy Virginia Tech

The U.S. Department of Defense has selected Virginia Tech as one of three schools to lead its new Acquisition Innovation and Research Center (AIRC).

The AIRC is funded by the DoD and directed by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. The goal of the center (which also includes the New Jersey-based Stevens Institute of Technology and Georgetown University) is to unite higher education expertise to increase efficiency in the department’s acquisition system.

Researchers will study how to better acquire quality products and resources used by the armed forces. Virginia Tech will also develop policies to expedite that acquisition process.

“This center is not about engineering the next-generation radar,” Laura Freeman, an AIRC executive team member and Virginia Tech associate professor of statistics, said in a statement. “It’s about helping the government obtain the next generation radar efficiently, while making the most of citizens’ tax-paying dollars, and ensuring the DoD can acquire that radar at the speed of relevance to operational missions.”

Other executive team members include Dinesh Verma and Thomas McDermot, both of the Stevens Institute of Technology and Systems Engineering Research Center, and Bill Rouse of Georgetown University.

“In the future, the center will look to add more universities to the collaboration as one of the center’s core values is to combine efforts within the defense and commercial acquisition community nationwide and worldwide to generate a marketplace of innovative ideas,” Verma said in a statement.

In April the center will hold the Acquisition Innovation Forum, where researchers can learn more about AIRC’s research on digital transformation and acquisition.