Reimagining government-industry collaboration to foster innovation, build capacity, and achieve victory.
CSIS’s Center for the Industrial Base (CIB) provides impactful research on the ways in which the United States and its allies can collaborate more effectively with industry of all types and build their respective industrial bases. The center primarily focuses on 1) DOD and federal industrial base challenges, 2) government contracting trends in defense, civilian agency, and international markets, 3) industry-government collaboration, and 4) international industrial cooperation. CIB monitors important developments in the global defense industry and produces major research projects and long-form reports; commentaries and articles in popular media; and annual conferences and livestream roundtables.
With a combination of extensive scholarly expertise and regular interaction with government and industry practitioners, CIB offers unmatched strategic insights to policymakers and to the broader public. Through conferences and roundtables bringing together government officials, industry leaders, legislative staffers, foreign delegations and acquisition experts, CIB is able to identify both common ground and continuing challenges within the increasingly complex defense acquisition community.
The center uses a wide range of research methods including case studies, contracting data, interviews, surveys, and table-top exercises. CIB maintains a unique capability to mine government spending data and uses it to identify major defense acquisition trends, look at the causes and implications of these trends, and make informed estimates of what the future will bring. Through years of analytical research, CIB has strengthened its capabilities to draw from large databases to present information in a clear, meaningful way. With each new project, the CIB team builds on past efforts by developing new, innovative methods to interpret government contracting data.
CIB’s experts are regularly cited and interviewed in major news and defense publications. The center collaborates with other programs in the Defense and Security Department (DSD) and teams across CSIS.
