Research examines options for the expanded use of Title VII of the Defense Production Act, incentivizing government-industry collaboration in the acquisition process, and best practices for intellectual property data rights management
Fairfax, VA (June 2, 2025) – The Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting in George Mason University’s Costello College of Business today announced three new reports as part of the Acquisition Innovation Research Center’s (AIRC) Innovation Projects program.
AIRC Innovation Projects support the Defense acquisition mission by addressing ways to improve public-private partnerships and sustainment policies, practices, and processes. AIRC is a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) of the Department of Defense involving collaboration from 26 schools, including George Mason University.
The Baroni Center’s reports provide analysis and recommendations for strengthening the use of Title VII of the Defense Production Act, identifying new industry incentives for defense acquisition, and data management of intellectual property license rights for the Department of Defense.
“To remain the strongest and most lethal defense force in the world, the Department of Defense must continuously assess how it can improve its operations and better collaborate with industry,” said Jerry McGinn, Executive Director of the Baroni Center. “Each of these research reports provide government and industry leaders with a clearer understanding of how they can strengthen their partnership to ensure the U.S. defense industrial base is ready for the next major conflict.”
Here is an overview of the findings and recommendations for each report.
Options for Strengthening the Use of Title VII of the Defense Production Act
This report explores options for using Sections 708 and 710 of Defense Production Act (DPA) Title VII to strengthen the ability of the Department of Defense and the defense industrial base to prepare for major conflict while possibly achieving peacetime benefits.
Section 708 allows for voluntary agreements and plans of action between government and industry that provide peacetime benefits as well as wartime industrial capacity for national emergencies.
Key findings on the use of voluntary agreements include:
- Voluntary agreements provide crucial access to industrial capacity in the event of a national emergency.
- Voluntary agreements create an effective environment for government and industry to closely collaborate on important national security concerns, even in peacetime.
- Voluntary agreements are best focused on specific industrial sectors, not broad sectors or individual companies.
- Consistent commercial incentives for companies to participate in voluntary agreements are important for both government and industry.
- Voluntary agreements are best established before a national emergency.
The report makes five recommendations for the potential future use of voluntary agreements:
- Identify industry sectors where voluntary agreements could be most helpful.
- Maximize the collaborative power of voluntary agreements for peacetime preparedness and for future emergencies.
- Strengthen the business case for voluntary agreements.
- Examine alternatives to voluntary agreements to assess the best fit.
- Emphasize the use of voluntary agreements for preparedness, not just emergency response.
Section 710 enables the convening of a National Defense Executive Reserve (NDER) of industry executives to be trained for government service in the event of a national emergency. While NDER units are no longer in operation, the authority still exists for a modern-day NDER function.
The report makes three top-level findings on NDER use:
- The NDER is a powerful authority to form on-call groups of individuals in case of national emergencies.
- The NDER model did not work in practice.
- An NDER today would need to be structured differently from the past model.
The report makes two recommendations for the potential future use of an NDER:
- Establish a model for and create a modern-day NDER.
- Assess the viability of utilizing the NDER authority to establish a modern-day War Production Board.
Identifying Novel Ways to Incentivize Industry in Defense Acquisition
This report explores how the federal government can better work with traditional industry in non-traditional ways as well as how to work with venture capital- and private equity-backed firms in the defense marketplace.
The research team conducted a literature review and held discussions with numerous senior government officials and industry executives from traditional, private equity-backed, and venture capital-backed firms.
From these conversations, the researchers determined six main findings hindering public-private collaboration:
- Greater investment transparency drives industry engagement.
- There is a mutual need for better understanding of government and industry “business” cycles.
- The lack of security clearances and access to classified information can stymie new entrants.
- Industry time horizons and incentive structures vary by the type of business
- Industry engagement activities across DoD are stove-piped and difficult to navigate.
- Improving industry engagement activities will have an important and positive impact, but changing incentive structures will have a step-function increase in government-industry collaboration.
The report provides recommendations for Pentagon officials to:
- Advance the Department’s approach to industry engagement with a focus on practical measures for strategic level agenda-setters and more tactical level buyers.
- Change incentive structures for industry to spur new entrants, competition, and greater private sector investment. These prioritize actions that agenda-setters and buyers can take to change industry behavior in fundamental ways.
Enabling Data Management of Intellectual Property License Rights for the Department of Defense.
This report is a response to the Department of Defense’s efforts to enhance its Data Management practices for Intellectual Property (IP) License Rights through researching commercial best practices, standards, and technologies.
In analyzing commercial best practices, researchers found:
- Industry emphasizes metadata management, compliance with standards, and governance frameworks.
- FAIR principles ensure data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
- Standards like CRISP-DM guide structured data mining processes.
For implementing these practices into government operations, the report recommends:
- Utilizing the Enterprise Visibility and Management of Operating and Support Cost (EVAMOSC) model as a framework.
- Establishing secure, scalable data lakes and authoritative databases for structured data management.
- Incorporating AI-driven data transformation processes to automate data cleansing and compliance checks.
- Deploying user-friendly dashboards and business intelligence applications to facilitate decision-making.
About the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting
The Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting is the first-in-the-nation university center to address the business, policy, and regulatory issues in government contracting. Under the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, the Baroni Center is uniquely positioned to lead this effort by virtue of the composition of our faculty and students, as well as our geographic co-location with the federal government and many headquarters and major facilities of companies that make up the $700 billion government contracting industry. Activities to implement the Center's vision focus on three lines of effort: Research; Education and Training; and Collaboration.
To learn more, visit https://business.gmu.edu/centers/center-government-contracting