Military Review English Edition July-August 2014 | Page 48

Our ability to innovate and adapt to changing circumstances is one of the great asymmetric advantages
of the U.S. military. A good amount of the innovation
within the services has come from loyal insiders, particularly from the junior ranks—people who see problems
at the tactical level and can create and share innovative
solutions. Internal innovators who successfully implement their ideas usually develop and refine them
through informal networks, peripheral to the people they
work with daily. These networks provide a fail-free zone
and energetic supporters.
Nearly a century after Eisenhower and Patton challenged the dogmas of their day, we continue to observe
a similar dynamic. Energetic young service men and
women are coming out of more than a decade of conflict
full of ideas and empowered with the autonomy they
found on a complex battlefield. Many innovations that
proved vital to our successes in Iraq and Afghanistan—
from vehicle adaptations that protect soldiers against
improvised explosive devices to software programs that
track volumes of intelligence reports—were in fact
developed by innovative junior officers and noncommissioned officers serving on the front lines. These were the
battlefield innovators who gradually helped our Army
adapt to a quickly changing situation on the ground.
As we draw down our forces engaged in major
conflicts, leaders accustomed to having a large amount
of autonomy and flexibility while deployed will find
fewer opportunities to innovate. We must encourage and
equip these energetic and idealistic people, or else we will
struggle to keep them in our ranks. We must facilitate
their creativity and take advantage of their innovation
rather than lose them and their ideas. Instead of passively waiting for such innovators to develop their ideas, we
must help them network with one another outside the
bureaucratic system. We need to encourage the creation
and use of mechanisms that help innovators connect and
collaborate, find constructive criticism of their ideas, and
develop feasible implementation strategies.

Creating a Culture of Innovation
A 1999 RAND analysis of military innovation,
commissioned by the U.S. Army, used case studies for
trying to understand how militaries improve battlefield
effectiveness.5 The study concluded that military necessity alone is insufficient to produce successful innovations. The right social and environmental factors must
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propel innovative solutions beyond the gravitational
pull of the bureaucracies from which they emerge. If,
according to Plato, necessity is the mother of invention, then an organizational culture that encourages
innovation must become its father.6 Creating the right
culture for innovation will be crucial in overcoming the
challenges facing the Army as we move into a post-war
posture of declining fiscal resources and increasing
global and strategic uncertainty.
A culture of innovation can only emerge inside a
bureaucracy if there is a viable marketplace for both
idea creation and incubation, as well as a safe space
for trial and error. Ideas need a place where they can
germinate at the practitioner level and then undergo
a rigorous peer-evaluation process in which they are
refined and developed. In the business community,
small business startup incubators such as Techstars,
the Harvard Innovation Lab, and the d.school at the
Stanford Institute of Design provide this function for
new business ideas.7 They provide a rigorous yet flexible process for generating, refining, and culling good
business ideas before they are presented to venture
capitalists for investment and action.
The Department of Defense (DOD) has no process
similar to these companies that help startups. While
many senior leaders recognize that our best ideas often
arise at the grassroots practitioner level, the reality
is that very few innovators at this level possess the
bureaucratic acumen and the practical experience to
turn a good idea into a programmatic change within
the nation’s largest bureaucracy. What these innovators
need is a mechanism—independent of the bureaucracy—that provides a safe place to refine and incubate
these ideas as they emerge.

The Defense Entrepreneurs Forum
Just such a mechanism, the Defense Entrepreneurs
Forum, was developed, funded, and executed entirely
by junior officers across the services beginning in 2013.8
Conceived as a web-based forum that brought participants together in person annually to promote innovation
within the DOD, the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum
has grown into a movement of considerable diversity.
Its members rank from sergeant to general officer. They
come from every branch of military service, and include civilians from the defense industry.9 The Defense
Entrepreneurs Forum hosted its first annual conference
July-August 2014  MILITARY REVIEW