The U.S. Navy is an innovative service at heart. Many key 20th century inventions originated from or were perfected by the Navy. (Think nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, GPS, and modern computers). However, the rate of new ideas is slowing. While successful idea forums and innovation units exist, the Navy writ large lacks a way to capture ideas and has few methods to encourage or fund bottom-up innovation. This is especially the case at the deckplate level, where many original ideas historically emerged.
The Department of Defense (DoD) frequently discusses innovation as a key part of the military culture of the future and a critical aspect of great power competition. It has created numerous organizations to solve various aspects of the innovation problem. However, these do little to promote an innovative force. The Chief of Naval Operations’ Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC) created a fantastic way for service members to pitch their ideas directly to the highest admiral in the Navy and receive funding and authority to execute. Sadly, this group was congressionally defunded. Organizations within the Navy are also creating new chief innovation officer positions, but mandating innovation from the top down is not a recipe for success. Above all, these ideas lack one critically important aspect: They offer extremely limited opportunities to nurture bottom-up innovative ideas from individual service members, let alone allow these ideas to grow into organization-wide projects.
This applies even to the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), National Security Innovation Network (NSIN), and NavalX, all DoD organizations designed to work with private industry to develop new technologies. NSIN gathers ideas from service members through its “Source” program, but it does not give them the opportunity to champion and lead their own projects, as ideas are immediately contracted out to industry once accepted by a command. Other traditional acquisition commands are in a worse position, as relying on the Navy Innovative Science and Engineering (NISE) fund only sponsors projects annually, a poor way to fund rapid innovation.
The Navy needs a system to enable individual sailors to develop ideas from within and get support to turn ideas into reality. More important, that system needs to support its junior members, while not burdening them with additional bureaucratic overhead. To do so, the Navy needs to learn from startup culture and from accelerators such as Y Combinator.
An incubator provides resources, connections, deadlines, or whatever is needed, within reason. It brings individuals into a startup environment, allowing them to polish an idea until something workable is produced. Accelerators provide more resources, but are even more selective than incubators and have higher expectations of success.
However, even if service members could champion their own innovative ideas, a career in the Navy currently has little flexibility. Most individuals have no time during the normal course of a tour to take on these sort of projects; those who are given an opportunity to gain flexibility in their career schedules can pay a steep price.
Sailors need time to experiment with innovative ideas, whether during a tour, around deployment schedules, or even in between tours. Taking a page from Google’s book, the Navy could provide a 20-percent time model, where sailors could spend time purely focused on a number of pursuits outside their normal jobs, including innovation projects.
Fundamentally, the Navy needs to create a safe haven for innovation similar to that in the private sector. The Navy needs a process to encourage innovation at all levels. The Defense Entrepreneurs Forum also provides great resources for innovative thinkers, but is largely composed of ex-military members. The Navy should not continue to push its best and brightest out of the service so they can sell innovative ideas back as civilians and instead support innovation at all levels of the service.
There must be a transparent and easily accessible process for an individual’s idea to reach the organizations that can resource it, experiment, and field a solution. NSIN, NavalX, and DIU still have a role to play, but wider implementation could enable and encourage innovation throughout the service, capturing ideas and expanding incubator-style experimentation, without disrupting naval operations or causing massive increases in overhead and expenditures.
To do this, each command should have an innovation cell that performs three tasks. First, the cell would educate command members on how the Navy innovates, project considerations, and what options exist to push an idea forward. Second, the cell would connect service members to the larger innovation units across the Navy and DoD. This also would entail coordinating between the sending and innovation commands to ensure innovation efforts do not interrupt operations. Finally, local innovation cells would help polish ideas and prepare individuals for “Shark Tank” style pitches. Obviously, in smaller commands, the cells might actually be a single person, who could facilitate connection to the innovation cell at the superior command. In most cases, it would make sense for participation in the innovation cell to be a voluntary collateral duty and command program, with members representative of as many of the various communities that make up a command as practical.
The cell should develop as simple a process as possible to gather ideas. Individuals should be able to submit their thoughts in as little as a few paragraphs—a problem statement and summary of the proposed solution. The cell should mentor those who submit ideas and hold frequent boards to review proposals and connect the best ideators to the innovation commands.
The Air Force has implemented something similar with AFWERX. Specifically, Spark Cells give airmen the resources to fund innovative ideas. They enforce a “fail fast” process that the Navy should adopt, allowing it to fund many ideas without getting stuck funding projects for years only to see them never reach the fleet.
Individuals whose ideas are selected by the innovation cell should be connected to innovation commands and be given time away from their normal jobs to work on their ideas. This could be done through a temporary detail to the innovation command or planned as an intermediate stop between permanent tours. While the Navy operates on tight schedules, it must evolve some flexibility to seize innovative opportunities, which—long term—could accelerate careers.
This point must be emphasized: enabling innovation while interrupting operations or damaging careers would result in a backlash, harming development of a more innovative force. Even the most innovative companies keep operations somewhat separate, with mechanisms to move innovative ideas from operational developers into an innovation branch—Google’s Moonshot Factory, for example.
Monetary compensation should be considered for those who successfully field a new solution. The current vehicle for such compensation focuses entirely on how much money a sailor’s idea saves the service; not all good innovations will save money. The Navy has an Innovation Awards program too, which recognizes the top innovations in a category each year. But, while recognition is nice, monetary rewards are more compelling.
Experimentation inevitably involves failure, so the service must identify milestones a project must reach to continue receiving resources. Projects that fail to do so must be reconsidered and potentially defunded. But failed projects provide great learning opportunities, and some should be considered for personal compensation if the project’s champion can capture useful lessons. Many successful business founders consider past failures the secret to success, and many venture capital funds look favorably on those who demonstrate having learned from those experiences. As in private industry, a single successful project may outweigh the failure of dozens of projects.
But only cultural change will set conditions for innovation. The Navy has progressively become less forgiving of mistakes, which often end careers. Yet, some of the service’s most revered figures made mistakes and were given another chance, most famously Ensign Chester Nimitz. Gaining the necessary support from command leaders for these cells to succeed will be a challenge. Some commanding officers value and promote innovation, while others focus their attention elsewhere. Not every leader will set conditions on their own, no matter how many times the Pentagon says it values innovation. To show the value it gives innovation, the Navy could change promotion board precepts to account for it.
Educating the force and mentoring will help build an empowered and creative workforce. Connecting the dots between innovators at operational commands and organizations such as DIU, NSIN, and AFWERX will leverage the progress the Department of Defense has already made. Cultural change must occur so the Navy can better adapt to the rapidly changing world.