GET OUT
Blank was contacted by the National Sci- ence Foundation, which was looking for a way for its scientists to turn their research into viable
commercial prod-
ucts. He developed the Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is now considered the standard for science commercialization in the U.S. and has been adopted by other government agencies including the National Institutes of Health. In 2012, Blank and Bob Dorf, a fellow serial entre- preneur, released “Te Startup Owner’s Manual,” a step-by-step guide to build- ing a successful startup. In May 2013, Blank’s article “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything” was on the cover of the Harvard Business Review, one of the nation’s most respected business pub- lications. Te Lean movement had gone mainstream.
Now, as the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy seeks to change DOD’s cul- ture and policies to drive innovation at speed, exploring “streamlined, non- traditional pathways to bring critical skills into service, expanding access to outside expertise, and devising new public-private partnerships to work with small companies, startups, and univer- sities,” Blank has brought his ideas and expertise on innovation to DOD, where they are gaining traction.
Blank’s introduction to defense acquisi- tion came in 2011, when he met Peter
Newell. (See “Emergency Insurgency,” Page 27.) Newell is a retired Army colo- nel; his last command was the Rapid Equipping Force, where he sped off-the- shelf solutions to Soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. After retiring, he joined a former Army Special Forces colonel, Joe Felter, in starting a consulting company in Palo Alto called BMNT. (Felter is now the deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia.)
“I teach a set of classes at Stanford, and one of my students was an ex-Delta Force operator who said, ‘Hey, your methodol- ogy sounds a lot like the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force and Pete Newell.’ And I said, ‘Who the heck is Pete?’ ” Blank said.
At what the two men thought would be a quick meet-and-greet, “Pete described what he did with the Rapid Equipping Force, and I described what we did with the Lean Startup methodology and turn- ing the federal research agencies on to I-Corps. And as he’s drawing his diagram and I’m drawing mine, we discovered we basically came up with the same method- ology, one that actually works from the battlefield to the boardroom. It’s a big idea. Same methodology—we were just using different diagrams. His actually got deployed where lives were dependent, and mine got deployed on the cover of the Harvard Business Review.”
Blank, Newell and Felter developed and taught Hacking for Defense (H4D) at Stanford, a class that unleashed teams of students on unclassified, real-world problems from DOD. As of 2018, the class has been taught at Stanford and 10 other universities nationwide. Twenty- four government agencies, including DOD, the U.S. Department of Home- land Security, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA and the intelligence community, participated by providing students with real challenges to solve. A sister class, Hacking for Diplomacy, was launched at Stanford in fall 2016. A series of other classes, including Hacking for Energy and Hacking for Impact, also have been developed. Today the trio just label the program H4X, where X can mean any subject. Te classes, Blank explained, create a new platform for national
ser-
vice, a way to expose students to parts of the U.S. government where a traditional academic path or business career would never take them.
INNOVATIONS IN THINKING Te more he delved into DOD problems, the more Blank realized that innova- tion is vastly different in business versus government. “In a startup, innovation creates new products or services that peo- ple want to buy that never existed before. In an existing company, innovation can be new or more likely can improve existing products,” he said. “But I’ll con- tend innovation in government is quite different.”
“Most military organizations make it incredibly difficult to work with civilians not just on the contracting side, but on the security side— almost impossible.”
128 Army AL&T Magazine April - June 2018
For DOD and intelligence agencies, innovation needs to be continuous, as DOD and intelligence agencies face what Blank calls “the Red Queen problem.”
“In ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ they remind Alice that she has to run twice as fast just to stay in place. … So innovation
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