WHAT KIND OF INNOVATION DO YOU WANT?
the technology is moving slower or needs a longer time to mature.
Army AL&T: Steve Jobs said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.” With Soldiers as the customer, have we got the equation right?
Chao: Tat is a key point. In the end, the Soldiers are the customer. Tey are the user. And the disconnect between the customer and the buyers was one of those topics the acquisition reform efforts were trying to fix in the ’90s because they were beginning to drift apart. And then the war brought everybody back together. It dragged the “system” kick- ing and screaming into the current age because the [Soldiers] were, in frustration, becoming their own requirements gener- ators and acquirers and going to REI to buy the gear on their own. I often made a point in the beginning of those war years: “Go take a picture of that Soldier’s gear, lay it all out on the floor, and draw a box around how much they were issued versus how much they were going to REI or some other store and buying.” [Tat] signaled that the acquisitions system had to catch up. And it did. We got multiple rapid-equipping types of mechanisms to change that.
As we get out of the war, [it’s] imperative that we don’t lose all of those hard lessons we learned. I think you’re seeing a grow- ing sense that we do need to involve the users—whether it’s through the various mechanisms that the Army has estab- lished to get their input or through the COCOMs
[combatant commands]—in
terms of generating the requirements and needs. All of this calls for a better dialogue and interface between Soldier and developer. Systems just developed by
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the acquisition system, unhooked from users, unhooked from reality, will create a problem. On the flip side, users also don’t often know exactly what they want, either. Right? If you just follow the polls or the surveys, you will also be wrong. At times there’s interpretation—Jobs said start with the user experience, not necessarily the user. I’m sure a poll of the customer asking, “What do you want?” would never have come up with the iPod. It’s that cre- ative tension between the two methods that usually generates the best results.
Having as much interaction as possible between the user, the buying commu- nity that’s trying to get things to you, the industry and the technological cre- ators—that’s key. Te growth of the use of IPTs [integrated product teams] is all a reaction, I think, to this fundamental truth that if you try to build a product in a disconnected fashion, you have a higher chance of failure.
Army AL&T: Engineers solve problems, but they also tend to focus on features over benefits. So the Soldier, the customer, might become secondary to the benefit because the engineers are so focused on solving feature problems.
Chao: Tis is related to the question we just discussed. Jobs said solve the user experience. Te same could be said: Solve the Soldier’s problems. Te best innovation comes from thinking about the problem as a whole—not by think- ing about the technology or the feature. Te benefit is derived from the fact that you are solving a real problem. I heard a story from a small startup company in the defense sector, founded by an ex-mil- itary person. His company was creating handheld devices to pull down fused intelligence data. He created the com- pany because he was frustrated by what he had in the field—they were getting
these big, clunky devices that had very nice touch screens developed by, I’m sure, very smart engineers. What they didn’t know or forgot or ignored, was that the Soldier was usually wearing gloves when operating these devices. Nice feature; useless in the field. Knowledge of the user experience allowed his firm to develop a better product.
Another example is the evolution of stealth. We didn’t start [out to] invent stealth out of whole cloth and without context because somebody said “I want to be invisible.” Tey were trying to solve a problem: “How do I penetrate an ever-better-developing Soviet air defense system?” It was costing a fortune to brute- force our way through it with electronic warfare and better-performing aircraft. We were starting to climb the steep part of the cost versus capability curve. And it was in trying to solve a problem that stealth came about—a very innovative answer that wasn’t an even-stronger elec- tronic warfare box or ever-faster or higher aircraft, but a completely different way to solve an old problem. Wartime situations serve up your problems in a very stark and fast fashion.
Te harder times are in peacetime situa- tions where you’ve got to think through more, “What are the problems I’m trying to solve?” And that’s why we’re entering a period where the imperative has gone way up for leadership to send those demand signals and those priorities—“Tese are the problems that are really important to me as an institution that I would like to try to solve”—and then let the creative geniuses of the industry and everyone else try to solve it.
It goes wrong when you either muddy up what your priorities are or when you’re too prescriptive: “I want you to solve my problem by having you develop a better
Army AL&T Magazine October-December 2015
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