Defense One:
When the Pentagon wanted to expand its tech outreach beyond Silicon Valley, officials looked to Boston, opening the second DIUx location there in 2016. The Army Research Laboratory is now joining them, setting up its own “open campus” in the city to help make its innovation efforts more nimble and cutting-edge.
ARL’s Northeast campus, officially launched today after a few months of building partnerships, joins three other regional collaboration offices the lab has set up over the last two years. Whereas DIUx, or the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, was set up by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter specifically to woo the tech industry, the ARL open campuses are meant to bring together U.S. government scientists with both industry and academia.
Army leaders have been talking a lot recently about compressing the space between basic research and the actual procurement of new weapons. “And to my mind,” said ARL’s Melissa Flagg, who leads the northeast site “that’s exactly the model we have an opportunity to play out and demonstrate the reality of it here.”
