Artificial Intelligence for decision support system to discover, map, assess, and engage Nontraditional Defense Contractors to Accelerate DoD Innovation, Enhance National Security and Strengthen the U.S. Economy.

One need to look no further than the 2019 NDAA and the DoD Small Business Strategy (Oct 2019) to understand that Congress and the DoD comprehend that the US small business sector is critical to the health of our economy and to our national defense.  “DoD recognizes that small businesses are a crucial component in our nation’s effort to meet increased challenges from competitors and adversaries that threaten U.S. technological and industrial dominance.”(DoD Small Business Strategy).  Despite the acknowledged importance of the small business sector, DoD spends over 63% of its contracting budget with 100 large defense contractors and deals with only a tiny fraction of the 30M small businesses in the US.  Congress has mandated that DoD substantially increase its small business engagement.  Third Coast Federal (TCF) provides the tools DoD needs to identify, evaluate and engage non-traditional defense contractors (NDCs).  For this STTR, TCF proposes to augment its existing small business tech sourcing app and search engine by leveraging knowledge graphs and other AI tools to create robust profiles and ratings of NDCs from various open source and proprietary data sets for the purpose of: (i) matching NDCs and their products and solutions to specific DoD needs; and (ii) matching teams of businesses, universities and innovators to solve specific DoD challenges.