SOFWERX and ICWERX, in collaboration with USSOCOM’s Directorate of Science and Technology (S&T) and the Intelligence Community (IC), will host the seventeenth Innovation Foundry event (IF17) in Chantilly, VA. This event aims to bring together Special Operations Forces (SOF) and IC personnel, industry, academia, national laboratories, and futurists to explore and ideate around future scenarios and missions. The theme of IF17 is, ‘Field-Forward Operations – Future Challenges for SOF and the IC in Data Dense Environments’.

USSOCOM S&T has developed and refined a unique process, the Innovation Cycle, to engage technology pioneers and leaders, and to discover and develop high risk, innovative, and disruptive concepts, capabilities and technologies for future on-boarding. This Innovation Foundry is the first phase of the Innovation Cycle and will be focused on idea generation. Deliverables for IF17 will include preliminary capability concepts targeting the defined problem areas which may impact SOF and IC operations in the 2035 timeframe in global forward, potentially austere, areas. This event will be followed by (1) a Rapid Capability Assessment (RCA) to further develop the preliminary capability concepts, and (2) a series of Integrated Technology Sprints (ITS), to demonstrate proofs of concept.