Doing Business with Draper

For more information on Draper or to initiate work, please contact Draper’s Business Development Office at busdev@draper.com or 617-258-2124.

As an objective engineering resource linking research to production, we help a broad spectrum of government and commercial sponsors to define their requirements and conceive innovative approaches to address their needs. Draper has the capacity to serve our sponsors in any of the following ways:

• Prime Contractor
• Design Agent
• Trusted Agent
• Direct Supplier
• Subcontractor to Primes
  

As a not-for-profit, R&D Laboratory, Draper has the freedom to work on problems that are too risky or too early to attract commercial industry. We develop prototype systems and sensors, demonstrate that they are feasible, and complete our mission by transitioning the technology to industry for volume production. We employ various mechanisms to effect this transition.

For example, Draper has been the design agent of the U.S. Navy for its strategic missile guidance needs since the 1950s. Through active participation, Draper has transitioned proven design packages to industrial teams and overseen the successful manufacturing, deployment, and fleet support of the systems from Polaris to Trident II. In other cases, we license our designs to a partner or join an industry team to respond to a government requirement.

Our robust Independent Research & Development (IR&D) and Corporate Sponsored Research Programs enable us to continuously refresh our core competencies and apply those capabilities to our current sponsored work as well as to new programs. We invest more than $20 million each year in IR&D, supporting internal efforts and collaborative projects with the country’s leading universities. This enables our staff to keep current with evolving university research and has resulted in a continuing renewal of staff.

Furthermore, through our commitment to advanced technical education, we employ 55 to 60 graduate students, largely from MIT, as Draper Fellows annually.