INNOVATION PIPELINE FOR SUCCESS
To have a reliable, accountable system of defense innova- tion that turns ideas into solutions with speed and urgency, DOD needs to establish an innovation pipeline, Blank says. What it has now are single activities, with most inno- vation going into R&D elsewhere—hence the exponential growth in private-sector innovation over the past 20 years.
The pipeline begins with innovation sourcing, that is, developing a list of problems and challenges, ideas and technologies that might be worth investing in.
During problem curation, innovators talk to colleagues and potential customers, looking for other places in DOD where a problem or challenge might exist in a slightly different form, related internal projects already in existence and commercially available solutions to problems. This phase also seeks to identify legal, security and support issues and helps identify who the customers and internal stakeholders for possible solutions would be. Here the building of initial minimum viable products (MVPs) begins. Some ideas drop out when the team recognizes that they may be technically, financially or legally unfeasible or discovers that other groups have already built a similar product.
Prioritization entails categorizing the list of innovation ideas using the three horizons model of McKinsey & Co. Horizon 1 ideas provide continuous innovation to a com- pany’s existing mission model and core capabilities. Ho- rizon 2 ideas extend a company’s existing mission model
and core capabilities to new stakeholders, customers or targets. Horizon 3 marks the creation of new capabilities to take advantage of or respond to disruptive technologies and opportunities or to counter disruption. Once projects have been classified, the team prioritizes them, starting by asking: Is this project worth pursing for another few months full time? The innovation teams themselves set the priori- ties—not a committee of executives.
In solution exploration and hypothesis testing, the ideas that pass through the prioritization filter enter an incubation process like Hacking for Defense or I-Corps, the system adopted by all U.S. government federal research agencies to turn ideas into products. This six- to 10-week process delivers evidence for defensible, data-based decisions.
Once hypothesis testing is complete, many projects will still need a period of incubation as the teams championing the projects gather additional data, refine the MVP and get used to working together.
At the culminating point of integration, if the innovation is Horizon 1 or 2, it’s time to integrate it into the existing organization. Horizon 3 innovations are more likely to be set up as their own entities or at least divisions. Trying to integrate these new, unbudgeted and unscheduled inno- vation projects into an engineering organization that has line-item budgets for people and resources results in chaos and frustration. (Graphic courtesy of Steve Blank)
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CRITICAL THINKING
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