Maintenance Innovation Challenge Shapes Future of Maintenance and Sustainment

The Maintenance Innovation Challenge (MIC) is now open for submissions! As part of the DoD Maintenance Symposium, the MIC is an important venue to present innovative technologies in front of a large cross-section of DoD decision-makers. The 2019 National Defense Strategy contains an objective to establish an unmatched twenty-first century National Security Base that effectively supports operations and sustains security and solvency. The MIC, an integral part of the 2019 DoD Maintenance Symposium, aligns well with this strategy.

The MIC aims to elevate and expand the call for maintenance innovation to include not only new technology, hardware, and software but also unique partnerships, resourcing strategies, business practices or processes that promise to make maintenance more capable, agile, and affordable.

Six finalists will be chosen prior to the event. They will have ten minutes to present their technology at the MIC and another five minutes to answer questions. One finalist will win the overall Technology Award and the audience will decide on a People’s Choice Award winner.

“Through the Maintenance Innovation Challenge, we seek to identify game-changing technologies that will enable the sustainment community to address warfighter readiness at best cost,” says Greg Kilchenstein, director, Enterprise Maintenance Technology, ODASD, Materiel Readiness.

All submissions that meet the minimum criteria for the competition will be posted on a public website and included in a MIC summary booklet, distributed at the DoD Maintenance Symposium.

What former winners have said about the MIC:

“I couldn’t be more thrilled with winning the MIC People’s Choice Award. It brought the benefits of my magnets to the attention of the hundreds of DoD decision-makers in the audience,” says Jim Michael, president of Maglogix™, People’s Choice Award winner at the 2018 MIC.

“This technology will realize savings in both fiscal and human capital resources and is a good forecasting tool for the maintenance community. With this technology what used to be a two-week turnaround for analysis now takes 10 minutes. I was surprised and happy to win this award, which is impressive considering the stiff competition. I’m happy to bring awareness to this innovative product,” says MGySgt Lance Baughman who received a People’s Choice Award for “Expeditionary Fluid Analysis Capability” at the 2016 MIC.

There may only be six finalists and two winners, but all submitted technologies champion the effort of enhanced warfighter readiness.

To learn more about submitting an abstract for the MIC, visit https://competition.ncms.org/