The NOAA Technology Partnerships Office (TPO) builds collaborative relationships between NOAA researchers and regional, national, and global partners, and fosters entrepreneurship and small business growth. Make an impact and grow your innovations with us!
-- Kortney Opshaug, Blue Ocean Gear & Richard Riels, Crab Raft
The NOAA Technology Partnerships Office (TPO) is serving the U.S. economy by investing in impactful solutions, transferring innovative technology to the marketplace, and facilitating strategic partnerships to enhance and deliver on NOAA’s mission.
TPO routinely works in developing partnerships with private entities in marketing commercial technologies to improve NOAA’s data collection efficiency. This supports weather and environmental data collection that private companies could use to deliver novel weather predictions and climate information.
We fund innovative small business proposals for the development of technology, products, and services related to NOAA’s mission with excellent commercial potential.
We ensure rapid and impactful transfer of inventions and innovative technology developed by NOAA researchers to the commercial marketplace.
Public-private partnerships are vital for bringing private sector innovation and agility into the public realm and NOAA’s research and development enterprise.
Rooted in Federal Law, our Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Technology Transfer (T2) programs capitalize on successful commercialization of innovative technologies in support of a strong and resilient U.S. economy.
References:
Federal Tech Transfer Act of 1986
Small Business Innovation Development Act of 1982
Dragoon Technology, LCC builds single-use, long-lasting drones that can collect data on the birth of tropical storms with support from the NOAA Small Business Innovation Research program.
Blue Ocean Gear, a California-based small business, is a company the develops and sells Smart Buoys – intelligent, connected fishing buoys that allow users to track the exact location and movement of their fishing gear.
NOAA Ocean Exploration and Fugro have signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) to develop and use uncrewed systems for ocean exploration to enhance the efficiency, reach and impact of NOAA’s mission to explore the deep ocean.
NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) and Google LLC are teaming up to maximize the benefits of a new artificial intelligence (AI) weather forecast model to advance NOAA’s mission to save lives, mitigate property loss and improve the nation’s economy by issuing the best forecasts of hurricanes and other hazardous tropical weather.
NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory and Global Systems Laboratory and the artificial intelligence startup Brightband have entered into a two-year Cooperative Research And Development Agreement (CRADA) that will optimize a vast NOAA-managed archive of observational weather data for training artificial intelligence (AI)-based weather forecasting applications.