2024 Maintenance Innovation Challenge
The Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense – Materiel Readiness is pleased to announce the return of the Maintenance Innovation Challenge (MIC) with live presentations from the finalists at the DoD Maintenance Symposium in Salt Lake City, UT.
Overview
The competition is open to new innovations that include novel technologies, unique collaborative business relationships, resourcing strategies, business processes, production processes, and any other transformative capability that has the potential to make maintenance and sustainment more agile, effective, efficient, and affordable. The review and selection process provides great exposure as the top five innovations and the final winner are determined by senior DOD sustainment leaders.
Finalists will present their solutions in person at the always popular and heavily attended MIC breakout session at the 2024 DoD Maintenance Symposium. Audience members at the MIC session will have the opportunity to select the MIC People’s Choice Award winner from the finalists based on their presentations.
In addition to the top MIC winner and “People’s Choice” winner receiving high-profile DOD-wide recognition and striking trophies at the plenary session the following day, the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences has offered to provide $50,000 of in-kind support to both the MIC winner and the “People’s Choice” winner.
The online submission process involves only a 500 words or less abstract (Outline provided) and a short demonstration video no longer than 3 minutes. Submissions are encouraged from the government, academia, and industry. The submission period is now open! The deadline for submissions is Sunday, October 6th, 2024.
Submission Requirements
Submissions for the Maintenance Innovation Challenge should include an abstract (300-500 words, 3000 characters maximum) and short demonstration video and be focused around a maintenance-related technology. Abstracts must contain the following to be eligible for consideration:
- Problem Statement
- Description of the Innovation Solution
- Benefits to the DoD
- Innovation Challenges
- Technical Maturity/ Demonstration Results
- Note: OV-1 or Graphic should be covered by the video
Video Requirements
- The purpose of this video is to provide a brief demonstration of the technology. It is NOT a commercial describing your organization or company.
- Video should be concise, under 3 minutes in length.
- Video doesn’t need to be professionally produced; it can be filmed using a smartphone.
- It’s important to emphasize that this is not a sales presentation; we’re seeking informative content about the technology.
- Videos should be submitted as a URL.
- Individuals can drop their mp4 file into Box.com, Dropbox, Google Drive, Vimeo, or Youtube. After uploading the video, users can receive a URL, which they can use in their Submission.
- All MIC finalists will have opportunity to adjust video for presentation at the DoD Maintenance Symposium.
Note: All submissions will be published online. By submitting, you are authorizing release to the public and that the submission has been vetted for public viewing and does not contain proprietary or confidential information.
Scoring Criteria
Submissions will be judged based on the following criteria:
- Maintenance relevance/impact: How much does it impact maintenance? Does it approve the efficiency and/or effectiveness of current maintenance practices (e.g. cost, safety, cycle time, necessary manpower, readiness, etc.)?
- Originality/contribution to the state-of-the-art: How original or innovative is it?
- Avoidance of commercialism: Does it describe a technology and how it will improve maintenance, or does it attempt to market the organization?
- Technical maturity: How mature or ready is the technology? Has it been prototyped or successfully demonstrated?
- Cross-service applicability: Is it potentially applicable to all service branches of the military and the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA)?
- Feasibility/practicality: How viable would it be to transition the technology for use by the Department of Defense (DoD)? Considerations include DoD maintenance needs, needs of specific DoD programs, implementation, the readiness level of the technology, and the strength/validity of test or simulation data supporting performance claims.
Enter Submission
Complete all fields in the abstract submission form below. Include the below in your abstract:
- Problem Statement
- Description of the Innovation Solution
- Benefits to the DOD
- Innovation Challenges
- Technical Maturity/Demonstration Results
- New Memorandum to come
Upload saved file. Submit form.
All submitted content must be reviewed and approved for public release.
Follow Up
- Following your submission, our team will review your submission.
- Once the submission is reviewed, our team will send you an email with any questions or additional information needs.
- A confirmation will be sent once the submission is input into the judging software.
- In early November the 6 finalists will be announced. Please stay tuned for additional information.
Contact
- If you encounter an error with the following form, please email mic@ncms.org with a description or your issue. Our team will follow up as soon as possible.