BLUEPRINT FOR INNOVATION
But while such partnerships worked for CISA, would they work for other agencies? How could staff create conditions within an organization to make innovation possible? Te issue, she real- ized, was that there was no blueprint to follow for a government organization seeking to pursue innovation. So she decided to write one.
AN INNOVATION GUIDEBOOK “Creating Innovation Navigators,” published in June by BMNT, the Palo Alto, California-based consultancy where Horne now works as entrepreneur-in-residence, “is the book that I wish I had been given when I was asked to stand up something in innovation within CISA,” she said, “because I didn’t understand innovation. I knew nothing about innovation.”
Te book is a companion to a training course of the same name that BMNT created for public sector innovators, although the book can stand alone as a teaching tool, Horne said. It consists of eight modules, each of which contains sample cases and prac- tical exercises to gain practice in building an innovation effort. Te book also includes an extensive set of appendices provid- ing detailed steps for building and measuring progress along an Innovation Pipeline; a glossary of common government innova- tion language and resources for further study. Te book brings together BMNT approaches and is based on lessons learned by BMNT and important innovators such as company CEO Pete Newell, a retired Army colonel who formerly ran the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force; Steve Blank, the Stanford University adjunct professor who created the Lean Startup movement; Steve Spear, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology’s Sloan School of Management, and others.
Horne came to Washington in the years following Sept. 11, 2001, eager to help prevent another attack against the United States. Before that she was senior executive editor at Tomson Reuters and received a Master of Public Administration degree from the Harvard Kennedy School. Before joining CISA, she worked at the National Security Agency, was the director of the Office of Communications at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs and worked at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence not long after its standup in 2005.
ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION When most people think of government innovation, they think of the space program, the military and the work of startups based in Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, Texas, and across the coun- try supplying DOD with wild new technologies that can be deployed on battlefields around the world. But most government
60 Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2023 INTO THE UNKNOWN
“Innovation is inherently about not knowing exactly what’s going to happen,” says Horne.
innovation, Horne said, doesn’t involve technology. Rather, it involves finding new and better ways for government agencies to accomplish their missions.
“For DOD, so much about innovation and its 120 innovation organizations, bringing in emerging and commercial capabili- ties is a very important way to approach innovation,” she said. “But for the rest of the U.S. government, finding and deploying widgets around the world is not usually central to their mission.”
Among the successes for the CISA Innovation Hub was vastly reducing the time it took to hire new people. Working with CISA human resources, the hub was able to change some basic poli- cies and sped up hiring time from eight months to six weeks.
Te Innovation Hub worked with BMNT—a Silicon Valley innovation consultancy and early-stage tech incubator that was established in 2013 by two former Army colonels, Pete Newell and Joe Felter—to develop Hacking for Homeland Security, modeled after BMNT’s Hacking for Defense (H4D) program. Today, Hacking for Defense is taught at more than 50 Ameri- can universities, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and at universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. Te Hacking for Homeland Security program sets loose teams of students to find solutions for real-world problems from TSA, FEMA and CISA.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140
