{"id":73836,"date":"2019-09-11T14:33:01","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T18:33:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/?p=73836"},"modified":"2024-01-04T15:09:15","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T20:09:15","slug":"ddn-afrl-small-business-director-touts-wsu-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/2019\/09\/11\/ddn-afrl-small-business-director-touts-wsu-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Dayton Daily News: AFRL Small Business Director touts WSU project"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpt<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Bill Harrison, AFRL small business director
Photo courtesy Dayton Daily News<\/p><\/div>\n

When Bill Harrison speaks, those interested in doing business with the Air Force listen.<\/p>\n

Harrison is the director of small business outreach at the Air Force Research Laboratory, based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As such, he can be seen as a kind of gatekeeper to anyone hoping to work with the largest single-site employer in the state of Ohio, a complex with about 30,000 Air Force and civilian employees.<\/p>\n

This is an edited transcript of a recent interview with Harrison, in which he talks about Wright State University Applied Research Center\u2019s (WSARC) recent $49 million Air Force contract award and other topics.<\/p>\n

Question<\/strong>: Tell me about this new contract Wright State has won with the Air Force. Why was WSARC selected?<\/p>\n

Harrison<\/strong>: \u201cWe selected them as a partnership intermediary because of the role they have been playing in the state of Ohio with the Ohio Federal Research Network. In that role, they\u2019ve been engaging with Ohio research universities, and they really have begun to understand the challenges of working with research universities, and how they view that it\u2019s very difficult to work with the Department of Defense. So we\u2019re going to build on their knowledge, to build training programs, to build various engagements with academia, and then scale from Ohio to across the country in a logical, kind of spiral path.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q:<\/strong> What\u2019s the potential here? Will this truly become nationwide?<\/p>\n

Harrison<\/strong>: \u201cYes, absolutely, we want to go nationwide. Again, what we have seen with various programs \u2014 we fund a lot of very basic research with universities, but we don\u2019t tap into some of the technologies quick enough to kind of help them move out. \u2026 Historically, we\u2019ve never been able to pull the technology out very well. So we want to take a new effort to really get some return on investment and pull things out of the universities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q<\/strong>: You\u2019re also looking for the workforce of the future.<\/p>\n

Harrison<\/strong>: \u201cAbsolutely. We have seen this as really key. Can we pull the technologies out into the small business world? That becomes a draw for workforce development. If it\u2019s relevant technologies for the Air Force, that also gives us the opportunity to potentially hire some of the students when they graduate. So we again see this as a real benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q<\/strong>: You have always said that today\u2019s defense contracting process is not the contracting process of yesteryear. Tell me about that.<\/p>\n

\"WrightHarrison<\/strong>: \u201cVery much so, especially what we\u2019re doing with the Small Business Innovation Research or SBIR and SBIR program. We\u2019re right now standing up a center of excellence for that. We\u2019ve been doing very aggressive efforts to do fast contracting. You\u2019ve probably read some of that, with our pitch days, where companies come in and pitch and within 15 minutes we\u2019re getting contracts. We\u2019re doing a lot of pioneering with one-page contracts \u2026 We are trying to work at a pace that the small businesses want us to work. In some cases, we\u2019ve been making first awards using the government purchase credit card, basically giving these small businesses (funds) up front to hit the ground running.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q<\/strong>: Is this center of excellence new?<\/p>\n

Harrison<\/strong>: It will be based at Wright-Patt. \u2026 It will develop some best practices in the contracting space, in the financial management space, in the program management space, and then I\u2019ll call it \u2018the education space.\u2019 How do we train people across the Air Force and train industry and academia on what we\u2019re doing, how we\u2019re making it easier for them to do business. We want to drive competition, but we want to drive it in a positive way to bring really cutting-edge technologies in. It\u2019s a team that\u2019s dedicated to doing that.<\/p>\n

Q<\/strong>: How many small businesses are you in contact with, in Dayton and beyond?<\/p>\n

Harrison<\/strong>: \u201cI\u2019d have to get back with you to give you accurate numbers. But in the Dayton region, it\u2019s literally hundreds. Across the state, again, in the hundreds. And nationally, thousands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q<\/strong>: What else should we know about the Wright State project?<\/p>\n

Harrison<\/strong>: \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a bit more challenging. We work on different schedules. Universities, their prime mission is training students and getting them to graduate. Again, that fits into our workforce. But again, they do a lot of cool research in advanced technologies. We\u2019re going to harness that.\u201d<\/p>\n

View the original story at daytondailynews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpt When Bill Harrison speaks, those interested in doing business with the Air Force listen. Harrison is the director of small business outreach at the Air Force Research Laboratory, based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As such, he can be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":73844,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[730],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wright-state-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73836"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145599,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73836\/revisions\/145599"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}