Bonnie Evangelista, Tradewind execution lead within the Department of Defense’s chief digital and artificial intelligence office, said DOD needs to change its culture to accelerate the acquisition of military technologies and capabilities and Tradewind is one of the initiatives that could help drive that cultural change within the department.
She wrote in a commentary published Monday on Defense News that Tradewind is an “attempt to clear a way out of the bureaucratic contracting labyrinth” and “a movement to take intentional action that drives not only the procurement and acquisition of leading-edge technology, but also the cultural change the DoD so desperately needs.”
According to Evangelista, Tradewind comes with a set of services and tools designed to speed up the acquisition and adoption of new technologies and one of those tools is the Tradewind Solutions Marketplace.
She said the marketplace allows industry innovators to quickly bring their technology platforms to government purchasers by submitting a short video of their platform explaining its potential use in addressing DOD’s problem sets.
“For government, this means a searchable inventory of potential technology solutions that have met competition standards for Federal Acquisition Regulation and non-FAR based contracting methodologies,” Evangelista noted. “No more time spent in source selections and downselects — just find a solution and buy it.”
