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Bridging Innovation in Action

Since the inception of Bridging Innovation nearly ten years ago, the program has demonstrated continuous development through our team’s growth, increased sponsor engagement, and expanded reach from coast-to-coast.​

Bridging Innovation is a corporate resource—set out to effectively build pathways for our staff, researchers, projects, and sponsors to innovation ecosystems across the United States. We are uniquely positioned to convene government, industry, and academia to collaborate on big societal challenges.

The Power of the Innovation Network

More than twenty startups were recently awarded Small Business Innovation Research Phase II contracts by the Army during their xTech SBIR pilot competition.  The purpose of the pilot is to accelerate technology prototypes for crucial Army capability gaps into military platforms.

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Maintaining a Balanced Perspective on Artificial Intelligence by Paul Silvey

The quest to build Artificial Intelligence (AI), at least narrowly defined as computer programs that can mimic human cognitive capabilities sufficiently well as to solve practical problems for us, has again captured the business world’s attention. Government and private investment dollars are flowing into this sector, motivated by Machine Learning (ML) successes in performing object or event recognition and classification from perceptual data, at levels that can match and sometimes surpass the abilities of humans. The availability and affordability of massive amounts of data and computational resources, along with algorithmic innovations including large multi-layer artificial neural networks, has created a kind of gold rush phenomenon in the last ten years.

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Bridging Innovation Interview with Nick Rotker

Looking for an example of leveraging networks to make positive change? Look no further than Massachusetts’ very own Nick Rotker, Bridging Innovation lead for MassChallenge Rhode Island partnership and current Department Manager of the newly formed Underwater and Acoustic System Department at The MITRE Corporation.

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Innovation Tool Kit (ITK): It Really Does Work!

NewsLast September, about 80 MITRE leaders in the Health FFRDC participated in a two-hour introduction to the Innovation Toolkit (ITK)—a collection of methods and techniques curated by a team of cross-disciplinary MITRE experts to help teams work together to solve...

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Techstars Demo Days

Events Join Techstars programs for their virtual live demo day events, and know you can always come back to demoday.techstars.com to view all startups’ pitches. Click the links below to register for each accelerator’s upcoming event. Techstars Workforce Development...

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Extracting Facts from Hardcopy using AI

Forms, filings, hardcopy, transcripts. There are many examples of useful documents that are archived in various government agency systems that are typically not in usable condition – that is, usable for the automation of business intelligence solutions. Material that has been scanned from hardcopy or filed as structured forms (e.g., PDF) will often contain information useful to one mission area or another, but only when such documents are fully digitized, complete with metadata, and exploited by the right analysts and experts.

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Supporting Underrepresented Founders

Founding a startup is challenging, but even more so when the founders are women or people of color. They receive just a fraction of venture capital funds. The root causes of this dearth of access to capital are many, including systemic (gender and racial bias) and cultural/social (women are less likely to ask for funding than men). Envision, a virtual accelerator program, is working to combat these ills.

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Connect Tech Innovation Accelerator – 19 February

Applications are now being accepting to accelerate the entrepreneurial endeavors inspired by the pandemic that have potential spark economic recovery through connective technologies that strengthen resiliency in the flow of goods, services, and information.  The deadline for applications is February 19, 2021.

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Addressing Health Equity and Improving Access to Care

MITRE’s Bridging Innovation team is excited to announce another year partnering with MassChallenge HealthTech (MCHT)!  MCHT is an innovation accelerator that specializes in pairing entrepreneurs with industry champions to provide start-ups with a range of advisory and financial supports to help them succeed in their line of business.

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Evaluating Assurance of Autonomous Vehicles

Robots are increasingly playing an important role in applications ranging from manufacturing and construction to surgical robotics. Due to the critical nature of many applications, it is important for the industry to accelerate developing solutions and good practices that address cybersecurity for robotics.

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Help Bring Clean Water to Communities in Need

Did you know that 2.2 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water? Or that globally, 1 in 4 healthcare facilities lack basic water services? You can help bring clean water to these underserved communities.

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