By Muphen R. Whitney
It’s a punch line to a joke—that old saw about “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you”. In the case of the Department of Defense TechMatch Web site (www.dodtechmatch.com) and system, however, it really is from the government, and it really does help you—especially if you are a tech company seeking to do business with the military or the first responder community.
“This system was needed to help users locate business opportunities in the area of Research and Development, to highlight successful technology transfer agreements, and to facilitate interactions between the Tech Transfer managers at the labs and industry and academia,” said Joshua D. Morrison, TechMatch program manager, from his office in Fairmont, West Virginia.
TechMatch was developed by the West Virginia High Technology Consortium (WVHTC) Foundation working on an Office of Naval Research grant that was part of a noncompetitive congressional earmark by Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-WV1). Since its inception as Navy TechMatch, the Web site now has expanded to include technology transfer information on 120 DoD laboratories, patents, and test facilities for the Navy, Marine Corps, Army, and Air Force; and the system continues to grow.
“Most recently, we developed ASD TechMatch to identify DoD technologies that meet the needs of the First Responder community by working with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice,” says Morrison.
“We beat everybody”
TechMatch has become such an important and integral part of the DoD’s technology transfer effort that Cynthia Gonsalves, Deputy Director for Technology Transfer and Transition, says “It is a key component of our outreach to industry and for finding new technology for DoD use.” The site currently has more than 8,500 registered users, but that doesn’t begin to describe the system’s success or give an idea of the magnitude of its activities.
“More than 75 percent of our registered users sign up to receive the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR)/Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) solicitations,” explains Morrison. “The SBIR program releases solicitations quarterly. Each solicitation has several hundred individual topics. For a small business, it can be a daunting task to look through hundreds of topics to find the few that apply to their business.
“We review each individual topic, assign keywords, and then push the matching topics out to our registered users. In the past 24 months, we have created 2.7 million matches. The most recent SBIR release (in May, 2007) resulted in nearly 600,000 matches”.
The information is not hampered by any bureaucracy in getting its information out to users.
“We beat everybody in getting that information on people’s desks,” says Bob Barrett, staff director and senior program manager in the Scientific Research Group at the WVHTC Foundation.
“We are there before any other gateway or search site”.
Accessible to all
The site itself is accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and a browser. Visitors can browse business opportunities from several sources in one place; they can get information on licensable patents and the work being done in military laboratories, and they can read the latest success stories and find out about the latest “hot technologies”. The site is even more useful for registered users.
“Registered users will receive a daily EMail taking them to their matching R & D opportunities from FedBizOpps, Grants.gov, and SBIR/STTR solicitations; calendar events; and licensable patents relevant to their business,” says Morrison.
Feedback from users of the site has been very positive, according to Morrison.
“The feedback has been great,” he says, “and I haven’t had anyone complain about the price (it’s free!). Most of the feedback deals with how quickly we get the SBIR matches out the door. Users really like coming into work and checking their EMail in the morning to find the latest matches we created for them”.
Morrison and Barrett both say that the most important thing people should know about DoD TechMatch is the site’s URL: www.dodtechmatch.com.
“There is a great deal of useful information there,” says Barrett. “It is free and is continually updated. This is the only place where that collection of information can be found in one place”.
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