Improving DoD Energy Efficiency: Combining MMOWGLI Social-Media Brainstorming With Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) to Strengthen the Defense Acquisition Process

Abstract

DoD energy inefficiency is a significant liability and a constraint on operations and a force-protection challenge. It is therefore imperative to reduce energy demand and provide operational forces greater flexibility among alternative energy sources. However, the current acquisition processes undervalue technologies with the potential to improve energy efficiency. We report the results of leveraging an innovative platform, the Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) to link and elicit collective intelligence from the acquisition community for the challenge of DoD energy inefficiency. We first linked the existing MMOWGLI energy data with samples of acquisition data using Lexical Link Analysis (LLA). We generated match matrices based on themes discovered in both data sets. The themes and match matrices helped identify the gaps and opportunities to apply collective intelligence from the MMOWGLI game to the current acquisition process. This effort demonstrates superb potential of an innovative methodology that can be deployed quickly to mobilize the intellectual capacities of the acquisition community. It may also increase the overall awareness of ongoing acquisition research to warfighters and create a positive impact for the future acquisition decisions to help achieve improved DoD energy efficiency.