On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 12:41 PM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 10:03 PM Joe Harrington <jh@physics.ucf.edu> wrote:

3. There's such a thing as a share-in-savings contract at NASA, in which
you calculate a savings, such as from avoided costs of licensing IDL or
Matlab, and say you'll develop a replacement for that product that costs
less, in exchange for a portion of the savings. These are rare and few
people know about them, but one presenter to the committee did discuss
them and thought they'd be appropriate. I've always felt that we could
get a chunk of change this way, and was surprised to find that the
approach exists and has a name. About 3 of 4 people I talk to at NASA
have no idea this even exists, though, and I haven't pursued it to its
logical end to see if it's viable.

I've heard of these. Definitely worth looking into.

It seems to be hard to find any information about these share-in-savings contracts. The closest thing I found is this: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/06/22/2018-13463/nasa-federal-acquisition-regulation-supplement-removal-of-reference-to-the-shared-savings-policy-and

It is called "Shared Savings" there, and was replaced last year by something called "Value Engineering Change Proposal". If anyone can comment on whether that's the same thing as Joe meant and whether this is worth following up on, that would be very helpful.

Cheers,

Ralf