Assistant Professor Dan Finkenstadt (Major, USAF) was selected to receive a 2021 Acquisition Innovation Research Center (AIRC) Incubation contract award. His proposal, “Gamification of Training in Emerging Acquisition Methods” in the Workforce Training/Advice Technology research area was chosen as one of eight from a field of 66 submissions to receive this contract award. Each proposal was reviewed by a select group of experts (constituting senior faculty members from across the AIRC universities, in collaboration with senior subject-matter experts with deep domain knowledge) and DoD executive sponsors.
The topic areas for these incubator studies are:
- Defense workforce training and advice technology. Assist in rapid workforce training and assistance—including for new authorities and approaches—through advanced training tools, technologies, and methodologies.
- Corporate memory and understanding future constraints for improve decisions. Enable better actions and decisions by capturing, developing, sharing, and effectively using organizational knowledge.
- Aligning incentives for agility and innovation. Motivate innovation and acquisition agility by aligning workforce and organizational incentives and minimizing disincentives.
- Agile test and evaluation (T&E) across the acquisition lifecycle. Enable efficient and effective test and evaluation (T&E) in operationally relevant multi-domain/complex environments at speeds relevant to changing threats and operational needs.
- Assessing return-on-investment (ROI) of digital transformation for decision making. Inform decision-making, budgeting, and tradeoffs by enabling assessments of ROI for acquisition investment options.