Moving Across the Valley of Death: NOAA's Bridging Program

NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) supports NOAA’s mission by providing the research foundation needed to better understand and predict the Earth system;, developing innovative technologies to improve NOAA science, service, and stewardship; and transitioning the results so they are useful to society. These results can be transitioned into operations, applications, commercialization, and other uses to support NOAA’s mission areas of ocean, climate, weather, and coasts. Ensuring a robust process to enable the transition is critical to advancing capabilities across the agency. However, there are some high value research and development (R&D) projects that are unable to cross the “valley of death,” or the gap that exists between R&D and operations, mission needs, application, and other uses. The term “Crossing the Valley of Death” was outlined in a National Academy of Sciences publication in 2000 as a “fundamental challenge for research and development to implementation.” Even today, impactful innovative technology projects have impediments in the implementation transition process at high Readiness Levels (RLs) due to funding shortfalls or missing collaborations.

OAR’s Office of Research, Transition, and Application (ORTA) has established a bridging program that provides funding when available to projects to cross over into operations and other uses to help accelerate transitions in NOAA and ensure that NOAA receives the best possible return on its investment in R&D. While the program is in its pilot phase, it has identified some high-impact projects with complex transition needs, which without bridging funds, would have stalled and fallen short of fully transitioning to their intended operational end user. Candidate projects are required to have transition plans and/or letters of support that indicate acknowledgement of the value of the project to an end user and the end user’s capacity to adopt and sustain routine use of the mature capability (RL8 or RL9).

The ORTA Bridging Program in its pilot phase has demonstrated value by ensuring several NOAA R&D projects that needed support to cross the bridge into use. A fully supported program would ensure NOAA’s investment in R&D is not wasted due to projects being unable to cross the “valley of death,” and thus enable them to contribute to the advancement of NOAA’s mission to support the nation. This paper will describe the ORTA Bridging Program in more detail and provide examples from projects supported.