Why the Pentagon Needs an Innovation Supply Chain

The U.S. military needs to operate in a wide range of environments. Many areas offer unique — and evolving — threats. Amplifying this challenge, technologies are improving so rapidly that no one can confidently predict the future more than 2–3 years out. And even that is stretching it.

The Pentagon’s traditional systems and processes are not capable of maintaining dominance in this kind of dynamic world. The Third Offset Strategy (explained well by the good folks at War on the Rocks) was born out of this realization.

It’s not about perfectly acquiring shiny/expensive new stuff. We need to build for speed, resiliency, and adaptability.

Question: How does a $600,000,000,000+ bureaucracy get started on actually implementing the Third Offset Strategy?
Answer: Build its own innovation supply chain.

We think that innovation supply chain should be catalyzed via Hacking For Defense.

Hacking For Defense

Hacking For Defense — H4D — was born out of an accidental collision between Steve Blank and Pete Newell. It’s taking the proven methodology of The Lean Startup and adapted it to the special challenges and rigors of national security organizations.

That’s our secret sauce at BMNT. Instead of building businesses, we’re working on crazy-hard problems. The result is an early, messy version of a solution. And we’re getting really good at developing strategies to rapidly test those solutions. From there, an organization can choose to gradually increase resources, evolving into pilot programs and eventually full programs.

What’s more, our customers are building the workforce of the future. These are folks who can: identify and validate problems; come up with early versions of solutions; and create pilots with measurable outcomes that can be scaled up. These “MacGyvers” pair perfectly with more execution-minded personnel. It’s a beautiful synergy once the system is put in place.

The Innovation Supply Chain

The Pentagon needs this process. It has to build an end-t0-end problem-solving machine. Or — framing it in Silicon Valley speak — an innovation supply chain. An innovation supply chain is all the activities that need to occur so you can confidently proceed from “I have a really bad problem” to “My team is implementing the solution right now, and we’re already moving on to the next problem.”

To build an innovation supply chain, you need to get really comfortable with problems. That is the fuel for the process. The visual below summarizes the process from top to bottom. And there’s a more detailed explanation of each section underneath the visual.

Source

The hardest part of an innovation supply chain is often overlooked. People always have plenty to complain about, so they assume it should be easy to start finding lots of problems to solve. Unfortunately, finding problems with an “owner” is actually very hard. You also need a “champion” at the executive level who cares about the outcome, and access to folks who are directly affected by the problem.

Curate

Let’s assume you can get a problem. Normally an organization would plow ahead into procuring solutions. But an innovation supply chain requires a more robust understanding of the problem. You need to make sure to refine the problem, which includes translating it into language that can be understood by experts outside the normal Department of Defense community. Outside perspectives help validate the problem while also building a coalition of people who are interested in collaborating to develop solutions.

Prioritize

Refined problems are now starting to flow through the curation funnel. These must be prioritized by the leadership who eventually support the deployment of solutions. They have to be willing to stop or delay doing some things to make room for the truly valuable innovations. This prioritization offers the secondary benefit of developing an organization’s internal innovation criteria.

Build & Test

This is the fun part. Each problem that makes the cut enters an intensive process of: recruiting users and partners; further validating the problem; coming up with critical hypotheses about the solution; and testing those hypotheses in a rigorous way. This phase of experimentation allows your team to deepen its problem expertise, move quickly, and minimize risk. This is a messy process that has to be orchestrated by the problem “owner”, who is supporting the experiments while keeping the “champion” updated on the progress.

Scale or Kill

The moment of truth. Now the “champion” has to make some decisions. Each test will yield recommendations from the people who went through the process. These MacGyvers may want to continue to a pilot, collapse multiple tests into a single follow-on pilot, or kill off their idea entirely. The problem “owner” orchestrates these requests so they are presented logically to the “champion”.

Uncertainty and dynamism define the threats facing the U.S. We can’t rely on big nation-states to provide easy targets. What matters now is our ability to increase the speed of learning and adapting in a cost-effective and timely way. An innovation supply chain will provide the Pentagon with a steady stream of actionable opportunities to address current threats.