Miami Dade College Creates a New Center for Small Business to Tap into Federal Funding
Miami Dade College, the largest community college in the U.S. with 120,000+ students, has self-consciously positioned itself as a training ground for the next generation of 21st-century workers. Among other things, they now offer the first degree in Florida in Applied AI, along with an expanding curriculum that includes courses in cybersecurity, computer engineering, data analytics, and biotechnology.
The latest initiative by MDC is a Rapid Innovation Accelerator, announced in July at their downtown Artificial Intelligence Center. The idea of the center is to link the vast purchasing power of the U.S. military with innovative small business suppliers in the Miami tech ecosystem. “The accelerator is really a place of connection, innovation, and ideas,” Madeline Pumariega, president of MDC, told Global Miami. “How do we get founders connecting with one another and then connecting with resources at the Department of Defense? It is intended to make sure that we accelerate ideas and opportunities and get them to market – and get our founders the opportunity to do the business with the DOD.”
The program will be administered by MoveAmerica, a non-profit organization focused on solving the critical challenges facing America’s industrial base and supply chain, in collaboration with Lab22c. MoveAmerica is contracted with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP) for this task.
“At the end of the day, we know that venture capital is great,” said Saif Ishoof, the founder and managing partner of Lab22c. “But how about non-diluted capital that actually comes from a customer that happens to be the best customer you could ever want, the U.S. government – a customer that’s not going anywhere, not going out of business, and a customer with whom you have an opportunity to play your role in supporting America’s warfighting mission.”
A key speaker at the launch was Farooq Mitha, director of DOD’s Office of Small Business Programs. Mitha noted that Miami Dade County had 13,000 “advanced manufacturing companies” and a small-business start-up community with a value of $36 billion. “Since I started this job, I’ve been wanting to make it easier for small businesses to navigate the procurement process at DOD,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that a community like Miami, where we don’t have a strong presence of defense industrial [companies], was part of the solutions we need to tackle very, very important, complex global threats.”
Mitha said that Florida is already a top state for DOD spending on small businesses, absorbing about $28 billion a year in prime contracts, a number that grows to $50 billion if subcontracts are included. “We want to make sure that Miami is at the table, [to] help grow and expand the innovation ecosystem here.”
Also at the launch event were Earl Wyatt, the Executive Director of MoveAmerica, an NGO dedicated to strengthening the defense industrial base supply chain, and Gen. Laura J. Richardson, commander of the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command. Richardson, whose command includes Central and South America, was blunt in her commentary on the importance of tech innovation. “From my perspective, the stakes couldn’t be higher for Team USA, because we find ourselves in a great power competition with economic challengers such as China, and enduring competitors like Russia. The People’s Republic of China [is] stealing intellectual property, data, trade secrets, innovation, academic research, and agricultural research from Fortune 500 companies and startups alike,” she told an audience of community, business, and academic leaders. “We must all move with a sense of urgency to secure our industrial base, fortify our global supply chains, and strengthen our connections between our private industry and the US government.”
