The Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced the Defense Innovation Initiative (DII) as a Department-wide effort to identify and invest in innovative ways to sustain and advance our military dominance for the 21st century, and improve business operations.
The Defense Innovation Initiative will extend to all major activities within the Department, and include Policy; Acquisition, Technology and Logistics; Intelligence; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and the Military Departments; and accelerate innovation throughout the DoD in several key areas:
- People: The 21st Century requires us to integrate leadership development practices with emerging opportunities to re-think how we develop mangers and leaders.
- Wargaming: Reinvigorated wargaming efforts will develop and test alternative ways of achieving strategic objectives, and help us think more clearly about the future security environment.
- New Operational Concepts: To explore how to employ resources to greater strategic effect and deal with emerging threats in more innovative ways.
- Business Practices: Find ways to be more efficient and effective through external benchmarking and focused internal reviews.
- Long-Range Research & Development Plan: To identify, develop, and field key breakthrough technologies and systems that sustain and advance the capability of U.S. military power (leveraging areas such as: autonomy, robotics, miniaturization, big data, advanced manufacturing, disaggregated networked systems, etc).
These areas will be overseen, integrated, and managed by an active and engaged governance structure led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work — to ensure these combined activities achieve maximum traction in our system, that institutional barriers are overcome, and that our Department rapidly integrates real concepts and capabilities to improve our effectiveness.
Share your Ideas! It is the Department’s goal to reach out to the best and brightest minds in the DoD R&E Enterprise — from industry, academia, labs, think tanks, small business and the general public — to help us think through the technologically-enabled systems and architectures that we will want to have available in the post-2025 time frame.
A Request for Information released on Dec. 3, 2014 provides the mechanism for submission of these ideas to be brought to the attention of the Department for further consideration and assessment.
If your organization has technologies, concepts, or ongoing efforts that are applicable to this goal and you would like to share these ideas with our government team, please submit a white paper through our email address: luke.c.cropsey.mil@mail.mil. For direction about sharing classified information, please use this address as well.
Our intent is to prepare a report to the Secretary of Defense by mid-summer 2015 to inform discussions on a technology offset strategy, our S&T planning and next year’s budget deliberations.
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For more information about the Long Range Research and Development Plan, please go to the LRRDP website: http://www.defenseinnovationmarketplace.mil/LRRDP.html.