How the Government Can Buy From You

The gap between interest and award

UDC sees the same pattern repeatedly: customers reach for their habitual path, usually a full FAR-based competition, and for a complex buy that can take twelve months or longer. Other routes exist, some outside the FAR entirely, but a customer who does not know them will not choose them.

The routes are not interchangeable. A commercial solutions opening is a selection procedure, an IDIQ is an ordering channel, rapid acquisition authority redirects existing funds for urgent needs and a CRADA is a collaboration agreement. Each carries its own statutory conditions, and the customer's appropriation narrows the choice further. A company that pitches the wrong one wastes the meeting.

What the paper answers

• Which of the four conditions for a prototype other transaction does your team actually meet?
• What changed in the commercial solutions opening statute under the FY2026 NDAA, and what does DFARS still say?
• What do the SBIR/STTR reauthorization and its strategic breakthrough awards require at DOW?
• When can a company be bought on a purchase card, through simplified commercial procedures or by socioeconomic sole source, and at what thresholds?
• What does a combatant command need to turn a successful demonstration into a follow-on award?
• Which funding and testing programs, such as APFIT, FCT and JCTDs, still need a separate award route?

What's inside

• A selector table: find the customer's circumstances in the left column, read across to the matching strategy and its legal basis.
• Twenty-one strategies across innovation authorities, FAR-based paths and specialized or non-procurement routes, each laid out the same way: fit, cited legal conditions, UDC advice, and the customer's own steps.
• Three habits that turn the list into awards, including how to plan the follow-on with the first award.
• A color of money section showing which appropriation pays at each stage and how the FY2027 continuing resolution limits availability.
• An annex on APFIT, Foreign Comparative Testing, JCTDs, Defense Production Act Title III and the Office of Strategic Capital, and the award route each still needs.

The twenty-one strategies

Grouped as the paper presents them:

• Innovation authorities: prototype to production, research agreements, technology investment agreements, commercial solutions openings, broad agency announcements, unsolicited proposals, SBIR/STTR and Phase III, prize competitions, experimental purchases
• FAR-based strategies: micro-purchase and purchase card, simplified commercial buys, set-asides and socioeconomic sole source, justified other than full and open competition, emergency acquisition flexibilities, rapid acquisition, existing vehicles, interagency orders
• Specialized and non-procurement strategies: facility other transactions, CRADAs and technology transfer, partnership intermediaries, combatant command experimentation

Who it's for

• Small businesses and nontraditional companies with a capability a government customer wants but has not yet found a way to buy.
• Business development and capture leads preparing for meetings with program offices, warfare centers and combatant commands.
• SBIR and STTR performers looking for a Phase III or follow-on path.
• Companies working with government laboratories that need to know what a CRADA can and cannot do.

About the author

Chris A. Grable is founder and CEO of Up Doppler Consulting LLC, a Veteran-Owned Small Business in Leonardtown, Maryland. A Navy veteran with more than 45 years in DOW operations and acquisition, he retired from federal service as Senior Experiment Designer at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division. UDC helps technology companies find, shape and win DOW work.