Chao: Te point was a little bit the reverse. As DOD or government
is trying to
encourage innovation, one of the things that in some ways make the government different than the commercial market is that, in the commercial market, you can create your own market. To the extent that you invent a product in the commer- cial world, it’s also possible to invent the market. Tere was no such thing as the iPad market until Apple invented it; we all discovered that we wanted or “needed” one, and voila,
the market category is
created. Te government market doesn’t work that way: Tere needs to be a budget to buy an innovation and often, if a new technology is created but doesn’t match a budget bucket, it takes time to create one. Te creation of that technology bucket is not purely market- or demand-driven: there’s politics, bureaucratic policies and other drivers.
And so there you need more of a demand signal from the customer in the defense world in order to stimulate innovation:
“Tis set of capabilities is important to me,” or, “Solving this problem is impor- tant to us.”
Te part that’s becoming very difficult for the industry is that, during the Cold War, you had a very large demand signal: “Beat the Soviet Union.” Tat allowed industry to self-organize around that grand stra- tegic goal. As long as you were working to solve those kinds of problems, you were pointing in the right direction. Tat became extremely muddied at the end of the Cold War, where we lost that demand signal, and that was about the last time we had, I would argue, an innovation challenge that was so clearly defined at a grand strategic level.
And then the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came along, and that, at least, provided some guidance, or some demand signals,
INNOVATION SAVES LIVES Army Reserve SGT Santiago Zapata of the 323rd Engineering Clearance Company uses the Talon tracked military robot to clear a route of IEDs in June at the Combat Support Training Exercise at Fort McCoy, WI. War makes clear which problems need solving, spurring innovation—like the counter-IED capabilities industry and government developed during the Iraq and Afghanistan con- flicts. (U.S. Army photo by SFC Brian Hamilton, 108th Training Command – Initial Entry Training)
and you saw people step up to the plate with innovations to solve the war’s problems—everything from MRAPs [mine-resistant, ambush- protected vehicles] to different kinds of sensors or counter-IED [improvised explosive device] gear or UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]. People knew where to innovate because they had a clear capability demand signal.
Now, we’re back in this mode where industry has lost the demand signal— which priorities
are important versus
which ones are not. Is it to solve the high- end threat? Is it to solve the issues related to regional threats? Or is it still the terror- ism challenge?
Army AL&T: You talked about mature technologies, and one of the things that comes to mind is enabling tech- nologies. Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML and had really no idea where it would go, but knew that it could go somewhere. How important is that sort
of thing—having those enabling tech- nologies—to innovation?
Chao: Oh, it’s critical. Tat’s why throughout history innovation has not occurred in a linear fashion. Tere are bursts of activity. Tere’s a fundamen- tal, underlying, enabling technology that gets discovered—electricity, the internal combustion engine or the microproces- sor—that drives follow-on innovation. Te modern world is still experiencing the aftereffects of the invention of the microprocessor and integrated circuit. We’ve been living in an era that’s been generally tied to Moore’s Law: process- ing power doubling every two years. And now it’s combined with the revolution in telecommunications, enabling the sets of technologies that wire the world together, providing the infrastructure for the Internet revolution—which then permits collaboration at a scale and level that’s never existed before, triggering social and business model revolutions.
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CRITICAL THINKING
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