How NPS Student Research Delivers Capabilities: Innovation Capstone Projects (ICP)

Abstract

Innovation is the process of creating something new or improving an existing product, service, or process. In the national security environment, it is critical to ensuring operational and strategic overmatch against one’s’ adversaries. Without innovation in ideas and capabilities, nations lose their ability to outmaneuver their competitors and begin their ultimate decline into irrelevance on the world’s stage. Innovation can take many forms. It can be the development of a new product or service intended to meet the needs of the end user or customer and It can also be the implementation of a new process that improves efficiency and productivity in an organization. Innovation can be incremental, such as small improvements to existing capabilities or services, or they can be disruptive, completely transforming an organization. Disruptive innovation tends to change the nature of warfare and are marked by paradigm shifts known as revolutions in military affairs. This paper will address the fundamental problem that most new ideas have regarding transitioning from a “good idea” to becoming a viable capability in the hands of the user. The problem most militaries have is that the process of capabilities development tends to take too long, too costly, and lac the agility to allow for innovative and disruptive ideas to gain a fold hold, once the acquisition process has started for specific needs of the warfighter. Additionally, many of the critical and disruptive ideas born in the “foxhole” tend to die in place for lack of a clear pathway out of the foxhole. I will seek to define these challenges and present a new pathway to successfully cross the valley of death, beyond the traditional six pathways defined in the Department of Defense 5000 instruction. While these pathways appear to provide a well-defined and deliberate approach to technology maturation and innovation, they lack the opportunity to tap into disruptive innovation rapidly and in a way that supports both government and industry. In essence the current methods of transitioning innovative ideas is simply not robust enough for the rapidly changing dynamics of the future national security environment and it is time to change the paradigm and embrace the innovation paradox.