Comparison of the AOT and the legacy SBIR program is the primary focus of a research conducted by Gist, Evan A., Capitain, USAF as a thesis at the Air Force Institute of Technology, of the Air Force Air University (full document here)
Senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials have been raising the alarm about a fundamental weakness of the DoD’s acquisition process – it was not optimized for the current pace and location of technological change (Secretary of Defense, 2018; Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, 2019; Secretary of the Air Force, 2017) rankhaya.com. Innovations occur more frequently now than at other times in history. This is particularly true in the areas of communications and computing, where innovations are occurring in short cycles of less than 36-months (or weeks in the case of software) (Spataro, 2018). Unfortunately the DoD has not been able to capitalize on this change in the external technical environment.