Innovating Naval Business Using a War Game

Abstract

The Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (DASN RDT&E) created a Business Innovation Initiative (BII) to identify and overcome challenges presented by the updated Naval Open Systems Architecture (OSA) strategy. The BII seeks to find innovative ways to incentivize Naval program management staff and their industry partners to implement aggressive change measures that improve cost, performance, and time to field for national security systems. The BII conducts workshops and crowd-sourcing activities that focus on specific business impediments to OSA. The Massive Multiplayer Operational War Game Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) game was used as a crowd-sourcing tool to elicit the collective intelligence of acquisition practitioners, students of business, and industry stakeholders to identify and overcome challenges presented by the updated OSA strategy. The MMOWGLI platform provides an efficient mechanism that crosses functional and geographical workspace boundaries for exchanging ideas and forming community in addressing the OSA business problem. The results of the first BII crowd-sourcing event using the MMOWGLI platform are presented in this report.