Fixing the DoD Innovation Pipeline, Issue #1: What's the Problem?

First Principals

A good place to start with any sort of policy or process fix is answering the question "what problem are you trying to solve?"

Put simply: innovation theater. There is a massive amount of time, attention, people, and money pouring into "innovation" right now. We can talk about the VC angle, the RDER, T-REX, and replicator angle, we can look at the great power competition angle and the small business angle. We could look at metrics like technology transition rates, how much it costs to achieve ATO and IATT.

The tl;dr is that there is a lot of STUFF going on, but the positive results of said STUFF are far from conclusive.

Whats the Problem?

Said STUFF is all over the place; each military Service has their own myriad innovation events, exercises, posts of money, priorities, etc. The 4th estate likewise have their own, and the Combatant Commands still more. But NONE of it is linear, it's all a convoluted patchwork of personal pet projects and opaque rice bowls with equally obscure personalities driving decisions.

There's no linear pipeline to get new stuff from good idea/bench-top to fully integrated capability.

For reference, this is a pipeline (reference: https://monday.com/blog/crm-and-sales/pipeline-crm/)

"but that's a sales pipeline not an innovation pipeline!"

Yeah, don't reinvent the wheel, use a model that works, anyone who has done technology transition in the government knows that it is basically sales in form and function.

For further reference, this is NOT a pipeline:

This is a confusing patchwork of things that a poor staffer had to figure out how to fit on one slide.

This is also not a pipeline (reference: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RBA1300/RBA1352-1/RAND_RBA1352-1.pdf):

I would call this a general functional framework, but its far from a useable and executable "do this, then that" workflow.

Don't Bring Problems Without Solutions

The good news is that there seems to be MOST of the requisite parts to make a pipeline, some components are nascent or fledgling at the moment, but the raw materials seem to be available. We'll talk about this more in following issues.