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A -- BROAD AGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT/NATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ALLIANCE SOL BAA 97-03 DUE 033197 POC Contact Brian Wolfe, Contracting Officer, 301/227-2158 or wolfeb@nima.mil This amendment is issued to provide clarification to the original NATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ALLIANCE Broad Agency Announcement advertised in the Commerce Business Daily on 31 Jan 97 and to extend the due date for host proposals. This Broad Agency announcement has now been designated BAA 97-03 and proposals addressing this BAA should reference this solicitation number. This BAA is seeking cutting edge research and development in the following core areas: high bandwidth information communication, compression, computing, displays, information processing, records management, distance learning, assisted target recognition, multimedia databases, data architectures, storage media and storage devices. This BAA is soliciting two types of proposals, laboratory host proposals and individual research proposals. The first type, for NTA laboratory hosts, will be evaluated according to the following criteria: Recognized U.S. Commercial Industry Leader; National and World Record of Achievement in R&D; Broad Government and Commercial Business Base; Breadth of Experience; and Proactive Leadership in their field. Entities with research and development capabilities in the desired areas are encouraged to form consortia to host the broadest possible core capability spectrum and such contracts will reflect the consortium s Articles of Collaboration. Our intent is to award as few IDIQ contracts as possible in order to establish broad R&D capabilities among a few hosts, each of whom collectively (in the case of consortia) meet the above criteria. Technical proposals must, therefore, first of all demonstrate how the host collectively meets the host criteria detailed above. In addition, discussion should include a detailed explanation of offered technical capabilities, collective experience and resumes for proposed primary principle investigator(s). Host proposals must include a cost proposal providing fully burdened rates for labor, applicable hourly laboratory/equipment costs or departmental costs, and typical material or other costs likely to be involved in multiple tasks. Hosts must also propose fully costed independent research proposals which can be awarded as initial task orders under a resulting IDIQ contract. Final negotiated rates for resulting host contracts will be used for negotiating subsequent task orders. Hosts may propose rates for up to two option years. The deadline for host proposals has been extended from 17 Mar 97 to 31 Mar 97. The second type of proposal solicited is for independent research initiatives to be performed by non-hosts. The deadline for all independent research initiatives is 30 Sep 97. For both independent research initiatives and initial host task proposals, the primary evaluation criteria, of equal weight, are: (1) Scientific and technical merits of the proposed research to include (a) the degree to which proposed research and development objectives support the targeted technical topic and (b) validity of the technical basis for the approach offered; and (2) Relevance and potential contributions of the research to the objectives of the NTA as delineated in the original BAA. Other evaluation criteria, of lesser importance than (l) and (2) but equal to each other, are: (3) The qualifications of the task principal investigator and other key research personnel; (4) The adequacy of current or planned facilities and equipment to accomplish the research objectives; and (5) The realism and reasonableness of cost, including proposed cost sharing. As the primary goals of the NTA benefit both commercial and government objectives, cost sharing is anticipated as a goal for applicable tasks orders as appropriate. For independent research initiatives, proposals reflecting the criteria delineated at Sections 6304 and 6305 of Title 31, U.S. Code will be considered for grants or cooperative agreements in lieu of procurement contracts. Facsimile proposals will not be accepted. Fully electronic proposals are preferred. Text may be offered in MS Word 6.0, spreadsheets in MS Excel 5.0 and graphics in MS PowerPoint 4.0. Documents "zipped" into an executable (.exe) file can be e-mailed to the Contracting Officer at wolfeb@nima.mil. IBM PC compatible 3.5 diskettes may also be mailed. This amendment and the original BAA are available for review on the WWW at http://164.214.2.57/NTA/ (case sensitive). This site may occasionally post answers to clarification questions to the original announcement and this amendment or provide additional NTA information as it becomes available. No additional amendments to this BAA are anticipated. Hard copies of these two CBD announcements will not be mailed. (0051)

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