DLA’s Tech Accelerator Team showing how to spur innovation
David Koch, the director of research and development at the Defense Logistics Agency, said the Tech Accelerator Team is helping DLA solve problems differently.
Jason Miller
November 18, 2025 3:38 pm
5 min read
The Defense Logistics Agency may have solved two problems every agency tends to struggle with — attracting new and innovative companies and changing the culture of its workforce to work with those firms.
DLA’s Tech Accelerator Team has shown it can do just that. Over the last several years it has been using what are considered traditional private sector methods to attract up-and-coming firms and take an agile approach to solving problems using interviews, data and market research.
David Koch, the director of research and development at DLA, said the agency launched the Tech Accelerator Team about six years ago with the idea of finding commercial technologies from non-traditional companies to solve their most pressing problems.
David Koch is the director of research and development at the Defense Logistics Agency.
“We don’t go into a problem with a solution in mind. We go into it solution agnostic,” Koch said in an interview with Federal News Network. “What is the problem that you want to solve? Then, let’s pull in a bunch of commercial folks that have tackled similar type of problems before. We usually do that through a request for information (RFI) that goes out to companies. We bring them in and we see what kind of solutions they throw up. We don’t go into it with a preconceived idea of how to solve this problem.”
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Part of the challenge with this approach led by the Tech Accelerator Team was changing the way DLA leaders approached problems. Koch said they have done a lot of training around innovation to help DLA leaders and employees bring good ideas to fruition.
“It was more about, let’s interview senior leaders and let’s find a problem that we need to go solve. Now it’s really grown into a life of its own to where the program managers reach out and say, ‘Hey, I need a commercial solution for the problem that I have,’” he said. “I think a lot of times now it’s more internally focused, where we reach out to commercial solutions based on a problem that we know exists. We’ve become more aware of what’s going on across the organization. We know where those problem areas are, where there’s commercial opportunities to solve them.”
Koch pointed to an example of this approach in action with RGBSI Aerospace and Defense, a company providing engineering and technical support, around using digital twins differently. Koch said DLA had used digital twins for parts and for processes, but through this approach, the agency is using digital twins to improve its digital threads.
“You can pull in things like acquisition data, logistics data and manufacturing data, along with that thread so that you can pull in more industry partners and more people are available to make that part,” he said. “Now, what we do is we use a computer program to go in and follow where the data flows, and it maps the process for you. Sometimes you’re surprised when you find out how your process really works.”
The Tech Accelerator Team calls themselves “DLA’s innovation broker,” which works with other DoD and federal offices as part of a broad-based innovation ecosystem.
DLA spent $135 million in research and development in fiscal 2025 across three main portfolios:
- Logistics
- Manufacturing technology
- Its small business innovation program
Koch said about $53 million went to manufacturing technology and about $17 million was for DLA business processes or logistics research and development. Additionally, DLA received about $44 million from Congress, most of which went into R&D for rare earth elements and other strategic materials.
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Testing an automated inventory platform
Koch said heading into 2026, DLA will focus on four specific areas.
“The first one is strategic material recovery. We hosted [in September] our kickoff event for that being our newest manufacturing technology project. But that doesn’t mean that we’re just now starting strategic materials research. We’ve been doing it out of our SBIR for now for our last few years. It’s very timely, it supports the stockpile and we’ve had some really good success stories,” he said. “[The second one is] additive manufacturing and it’s really about mainstreaming. We call it the joint additive manufacturing acceptability. But mainstreaming additive manufacturing is part of the normal supply chain process that the military can use when they order parts from DLA.”
The two other areas are artificial intelligence transformation and automated inventory management. Koch said DLA is testing the Marine Corps Platform Integration Center (MCPIC) and also adding new technology to the platform to help improve how they manage products across 25 distribution centers.
“We have a lot of stuff that’s outside, think big strikers and tanks and stuff like that that are just out there in the open. So you need something like a drone that’s going to go around and capture that inventory. Then you have a lot of small things, think firearms and stuff like that that we have to do inventory. So that’s the backbone that we’re building it upon,” he said. “The idea is you walk down the aisle and your inventory populates on your laptop or your iPad. We think we can get there.”
He added that DLA is piloting the integrated technology platform at its distribution center in Anniston, Alabama.
“We spend tens of millions of dollars a year doing inventory, and it’s very people intensive. Our automated inventory project is all about automating that process,” Koch said. “The goal is that we can do 100% audit, totally automated, and save a lot of that funding, and then have that information feed into our warehouse management system. We’re definitely excited about the possibility.”
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