When a good idea surfaces, Weinert said the program brings the stakeholders together, including the people on the deckplates. “We’re pairing up these innovators with the program and platform managers so they can actually be part of a process to see how ideas can turn into fruition, and how those ideas can be integrated into existing strategic efforts already going on at headquarters. The champion who puts forward a challenge can now engage more closely with the workforce to find ideas and solutions, and how to evaluate and implement them.”

The RDC is always looking for the unexpected opportunities that might enable it to share effort or conduct otherwise difficult or expensive research and experimentation.

Weinert said “design thinking” and “human-centered design” methodologies are driving how the Coast Guard leads innovation. They play a critical role in designing challenges and prototyping potential solutions generated by the workforce. “At the end of the day, it’s not about me running a program, or the RDC running their program, or our capabilities colleagues running their program. It’s about supporting the Coastie with the idea, and how we couple our strategic needs with the Coast Guard men and women that have the talent and knowledge to help us design solutions that get us from our current state to our desired state.”

Research and Development Center

Under the Acquisition Directorate, the Coast Guard’s Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) Program is involved with more than 80 projects that help achieve Coast Guard requirements across all mission areas. As part of that program, the RDC is the Coast Guard’s sole facility performing applied RDT&E experimentation and demonstrations.

Weinert said Coast Guard leadership places a lot of value on a collaborative relationship with the RDC, because they have the resources, the talent, and the rigor to pursue some of the most promising ideas.

Like the Innovation Program, the RDC also invites ideas from all levels of the organization and has a process to evaluate them.

“We bring in leadership, not only from the Coast Guard, but also the Office of Naval Research [ONR], National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, DHS S&T Borders and Maritime [Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate Borders and Maritime Security Division], and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory [CRREL],” said Macesker. “Together we look at these ideas, and score them using a framework of measures. If the idea involves access to other existing technology research, there’s a better chance that we’re going to apply what limited funding we have to it.”

The RDC is always looking for the unexpected opportunities that might enable it to share effort or conduct otherwise difficult or expensive research and experimentation. When the Defense Logistics Agency offered material coming back from Afghanistan, the RDC recognized a way to conduct some vital testing. “We recently received some small UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], and we were able to evaluate a new surveillance tool in our toolkit down in Florida as a proof of principle. We currently don’t have a requirement for tactical UAVs yet, but we’re trying things out in advance of changing requirements.”

Not every idea makes it to the acquisition stage. “We’re actually putting off old projects that aren’t providing the return on investment [ROI] that something new would bring to the table,” Macesker said.

The RDC is currently developing execution plans for 100 projects. Macesker said the RDC’s portfolio process is very transparent and inclusive. The RDC hosted the Fall Northeast Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer with an eye toward future leveraging of its members, which includes R&D laboratories of the departments of Commerce, Energy, Defense, Transportation, and universities and private organizations in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico.

The RDC is able to leverage technology investments that partners and other organizations are making. This “technology foraging” takes advantage of what others have been doing to solve similar problems, rather than starting from scratch. “We’re big on tech transfer and innovation across the government,” he said.

“We were looking at a project to conduct covert tracking of various targets of interest, and we were concerned about the acoustic side of things in terms of our aircraft,” said Macesker. “Our partners at CRREL mentioned that they have a tool available that can estimate what that target of interest would be hearing. They’ve done a lot of these studies. So they brought that to the table. ONR has a lot of ideas, too, particularly when it comes to maritime domain awareness. And they brought some ideas to the table in terms of unmanned maritime vehicles that could have a lot of potential as low-cost maritime domain awareness tools. We might use this as a low-cost approach to monitoring the protection of marine sanctuaries, or the fishing zones up here in New England, or tracking wrecks and pollution from wrecks. We currently don’t have a requirement for it, but obviously the Navy’s been looking at that for some time and for a lot of different types of applications. So we want to leverage that.

“CRREL has some huge physical labs where they run cold-weather experiments,” Macesker added. “They’ve been working with us doing some oil and ice work in a couple different areas. And we’re partnering with them as part of the annual Arctic Shield exercises held off the coast of Alaska.