Special Operations as an Innovation Laboratory
Leo Blanken, Philip Swintek, and Justin Davis
February 25, 2020
At a recent conference, a young military officer challenged the crowd: “I will buy the first round of beers if anyone can find a strategic guidance document in the last five years that doesn’t contain the word ‘innovation.’†No one took up the bet. Innovation is both a buzzword and a boogeyman for the Department of Defense. Everybody wants some, and lots of people claim they are doing it, but is it working?
The secretary of defense’s advisory Defense Innovation Board recommends the following changes to current innovation efforts:
seek out empirical evidence [… be] rapid, iterative, and risk-tolerant. Instead of giving processes pride of place … focus on outcomes, and how to get there most efficiently. These practices should be generalized, and not only to products and services, but potentially to strategies and operations as well.
https://warontherocks.com/2020/02/special-operations-as-an-innovation-laboratory/
