At the Executive Summit Series meeting in Seattle, Dr. Tom Cellucci, Chief Commercialization Officer for the Department of Homeland Security, discussed his strategy of getting research and development commitments from commercial industry CEOs for developing national security technologies. In return, the department would provide direction so that industry could best understand what the actual market requirements are. Not acquisition, just direction and market information. They’ve recently published market requirements guides for industry and are turning out more helpful information. But it is still industries onus to sell what they make. One of Dr. Cellucci’s goals is to improve the relationship between industry and homeland security professionals, our nations first responders. This important group is highly fragmented across 55,000 agencies, not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Another goal is to let leadership know we have a national asset in our commercial companies R&D budgets. To date, he’s been able to get over $600 million in commitments, a number he is proud of, and should be. This money was probably going to be spent anyways, but measuring it in aggregate for the purpose of national security, creates new value.
Which brings me to my point. If we take all of the open source tools currently being used by U.S. government agencies across the local, state, federal and DOD markets and calculated the aggregate time value of the developers involved, my guess is the number would be impressive. I have not seen aggregate R&D value ever stated relative to the open source community probably because it is hard to measure. Certainly time to market, adoption, QA time cycles, etc. are all well discussed and studied. But aggregate R&D value? Sounds like a possible dissertation or maybe an analyst project. Or, if anyone has this data please let me (and Tom) know. The country could use it.
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