MITRE’s Roles in a PPP

Ideation and Planning Phases

• As a Founder, MITRE spearheads the creation of the collaborative by formulating a mission and concept, inspiring and recruiting partners, identifying funding, and securing commitments to participate in a proof of concept or prototype.
• As a Catalyst & Influencer, MITRE accelerates the start-up by working closely with the sponsor (e.g., to assess the feasibility of a potential partnership).
• As a Trusted Advisor, MITRE works closely with the sponsor and any founding partners to shape the ideation and planning of the PPP.

Pilot and Operational Phases

• Trusted Third Party: MITRE often serves as a Trusted Third Party (TTP), which typically entails three responsibilities:
  1. Act on behalf of the partnership as the independent convener and program integrator/manager.
  2. Serve as the data steward/trustee, providing the secure data environment and related capabilities to protect and manage partner data and results.
  3. Lead the technical work (including data ingest, preparation, analysis, and results generation) to answer the partner-approved research questions.
• Independent Convener: In these cases, MITRE is an impartial host for the partnership, and brings together partners or stakeholders to collectively address issues or problems. MITRE typically provides operational support (e.g., project administration, facilitation support for committees and working groups, etc.)
• Member and Participant: MITRE is a contributing participant or member of the PPP and:
  • Represents the company’s perspectives to promote the operations of the partnership.
  • Provides data and other relevant contributions to the partnership in a timely manner to support partnership operations.
  • Provides subject matter expertise to collaborate in good faith on partnership activities.
• Technical Consultant and Subject Matter Expert (SME): In this role as a technical consultant and subject matter expert, MITRE works to provide the partnership with solutions to technical issues and challenges. MITRE delivers independent advice, robust systems thinking, and interdisciplinary expertise to enable the partnership to achieve its mission.

A Trusted Third Party (TTP) helps create conditions for safe collaboration. Partners are likely to require an independent and experienced TTP when they have concerns such as:

• Competitive advantage – if information that partners share in good faith is used against them by competitors (in or external to the PPP), or if participation in the PPP causes their market position to suffer.
• Adverse regulatory action – if the agency that regulates them is also a PPP partner, or if industry perceives that the government may use their information for punitive purposes or sharing detailed/proprietary info creates additional risk vis-a-vis the government relationship.
• Commercial conflicts of interest – if partner data were, for example, to be resold or monetized, or if the entities who have access to the data also have an financial interest in the same markets (e.g., also sell products/services in that sector).
• Protecting IP – if intellectual property owned by partners is misused or if partners contribute to an invention in the course of participating in the PPP.
• Mitigating exposure – if the sharing and analysis of data or related PPP activities increases perceived or actual privacy, compliance, or legal risk.

A Trusted Third Party can demonstrably mitigate many partner concerns about the inappropriate use of their potential contributions (e.g., time, expertise, data, reputation, funding) to the PPP or unintended effects of their participation in the PPP.

• Partners retain ownership and control – Per binding agreement, all data submitted by partners remains under the ownership of the submitting partner and will not be directly accessible by any other partner – including government partners. Only MITRE will have access to the pooled data.
• The TTP is free from commercial conflicts of interest – MITRE is a not-for-profit corporation chartered to work solely in the public interest. That status, along with ongoing diligence in managing conflicts of interest, means that MITRE avoids actual or perceived commercial interests in the partners’ data.
• MITRE embraces its responsibilities per the PPP agreements – which are co-authored by partners’ counsel – such as acceptable data uses and protecting partners’ interests and intellectual property.
• Partner participation is voluntary and predicated on their receiving value from the PPP – if a partner chooses to end participation, the partner’s data will be destroyed.
• Data is anonymized appropriately – While MITRE may receive identifiable data for purposes of linking it for partner-approved analyses, it takes reasonable care to not attribute findings to any partner and employs de-identification techniques so that individuals and organizations are not inappropriately identifiable in results that are shared with partners and/or the public.
• MITRE uses proven security and privacy controls – MITRE employs tailored security and privacy controls – including threat-based and advanced solutions – to protect partner data that are based on decades of experience safeguarding highly sensitive data in the defense, intelligence, health, tax, cyber, and other communities.
• MITRE protects partner data from disclosure – MITRE is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552) (FOIA). If MITRE is subject to any legal process whatsoever for the release of any partner data or information (including without limitation, a FOIA request, subpoena, discovery request, court order, or other legal process), it will promptly notify the affected partner so that the partner may pursue its own legal action and MITRE will cooperate with the partner to resist or limit, to the fullest extent permitted by law, any and all disclosures of the demanding party.

MITRE has decades of experience delivering secure and impactful PPP solutions aligned with partner expectations like those noted above.