It was an honor to host US Deputy Secretary of Protection Dr. Kathleen Hicks at Stanford’s Gordian Knot Middle for Nationwide Safety Innovation. (Consider the Deputy Secretary of Protection because the Chief Working Officer of an organization – however on this case the corporate has 3 million workers (~1.4 million energetic responsibility, 750,000 civilians, ~800,000 within the Nationwide Guard and Reserves.)
She got here to the Gordian Knot Middle to debate our distinctive method to nationwide safety and innovation, and the way our curriculum trains the subsequent technology of innovators. The Deputy additionally heard from us how the Division can higher companion with and leverage the U.S. innovation ecosystem to unravel nationwide safety challenges.
Our purpose for the Secretary’s go to was to offer her a snapshot of how we’re supporting the Division of Protection precedence of constructing an innovation workforce. We emphasised the important distinction between a technical STEM-trained workforce (which we want) and an innovation workforce which we lack at scale.
Innovation incorporates lean methodologies (buyer discovery, drawback understanding, MVPs, Pivots), coupled with velocity and urgency, and a tradition the place failure equals speedy studying. All of those are achieved with minimal assets to deploy at scale merchandise/companies which can be wanted and needed. We identified that Silicon Valley and Stanford have performed this for 50 years. And China is outpacing us by adopting the very innovation strategies we invented, integrating business know-how with educational analysis, and delivering it to the Peoples Liberation Military.
Therein lies the main target of our Gordian Knot Middle —join STEM with coverage schooling and leverage the synergies between the 2 to develop revolutionary leaders who perceive know-how and coverage and may remedy issues and ship options at velocity and scale.
What We Offered
A key element of the Gordian Knot Middle’s mission is to arrange and encourage future leaders to contribute meaningfully as a part of the innovation work drive. We mix the distinctive strengths of Stanford and its location in Silicon Valley to unravel issues throughout the spectrum of actions that create and maintain nationwide energy. The vary of assets and capabilities we deliver to the struggle from the middle’s distinctive place embody:
- The insights and experience of Stanford worldwide and nationwide safety coverage leaders
- The know-how insights and experience of Stanford Engineering
- Distinctive college students keen to assist the nation win the Nice Energy Competitors
- Silicon Valley’s deep business know-how ecosystem
- Our expertise in speedy drawback understanding, speedy iteration and deployment of options with velocity and urgency
- Entry to threat capital at scale
Within the six months since we based the Gordian Knot Middle we’ve targeted on six initiatives we needed to share with Secretary Hicks. Slightly than Joe Felter and I doing the entire speaking, 25 of our college students, students, mentors and alumni joined us to offer the Secretary a 3-5 minute summary of their work, spanning throughout all six of the Gordian Knot initiatives. Highlights of those shows embody:
- Hacking for Protection Groups – Vannevar Labs, FLIP, Disinformatix
- CONOPS Growth
- Nationwide Safety Schooling – Expertise, Innovation and Nice Energy Competitors
- Protection Innovation Students Program – 25 college students now, 50 by the top of the yr
- Coverage Influence and Outreach –ONR Hedge Technique, NSC Quad Rising Expertise Monitor 1.5 Convention
- Internships and Skilled Workforce Growth – Innovation Workforce Vignettes
When you can’t see the slides click on right here
All through the over 90 minutes session, Dr. Hicks posed insightful questions for the scholars and informed our gathering that one in every of her key priorities is to speed up innovation adoption throughout DoD, together with organizational construction, processes, tradition, and other people.
It was encouraging to listen to the phrases.
Nevertheless, from the place we sit..
- Our nationwide safety is now inexorably intertwined with business know-how and is hindered by our lack of an built-in technique on the highest stage.
- Our adversaries have exploited the boundaries and borders between our protection and business and financial pursuits.
- Our present approaches – each previously and present administration – to innovation throughout the federal government are piecemeal, incremental, more and more much less related and inadequate.
Listening to the secretary’s conversations, I used to be additional reminded of how a lot of a radical reinvention of our civil/navy innovation relationship is important if we need to preserve abreast of our adversaries. This is able to use DoD funding, personal capital, dual-use startups, present prime contractors and federal labs in a brand new configuration. It would:
Create a new protection ecosystem encompassing startups, scaleups on the bleeding edge, prime contractors as integrators of superior know-how, federally funded R&D facilities refocused on areas not lined by business tech (nuclear, hypersonics,…). Make it everlasting by creating innovation doctrine/coverage.
Create new nationwide champions in dual-use business tech – AI/ML, Quantum, Area, drones, excessive efficiency computing, subsequent gen networking, autonomy, biotech, underwater autos, shipyards, and so on. who will not be the standard distributors. Do that by choosing winners. Don’t give out door prizes. Contracts ought to be >$100M so high- high quality venture-funded firms will play. Till we’ve new distributors on the Main Protection Acquisition Program checklist, all we’ve within the DoD is innovation theater – not innovation.
Purchase at Pace. Immediately, the typical DoD main acquisition program takes 9-26 years to get a weapon within the palms of a warfighter. We’d like a necessities, budgeting and acquisition course of that operates at business velocity (18 months or much less) which is 10x sooner than DoD procurement cycles. As a substitute of writing necessities, DoD ought to quickly assess options and interact warfighters in assessing and prototyping business options.
Combine and incent the Enterprise Capital/Non-public Fairness ecosystem to speculate at scale. Ask funders what it will take to speculate at scale – e.g. create huge tax holidays and incentives to get funding {dollars} in know-how areas of nationwide curiosity.
Recruit and develop leaders throughout the Protection Division ready to satisfy contempory threats and reorganize round this new innovation ecosystem. The DoD has world-class folks and group for a world that in some ways now not exists. The threats, velocity of change and applied sciences we face on this century would require radically totally different mindsets and approaches than these we confronted within the twentieth century. Immediately’s senior DoD leaders should assume and act in another way than their predecessors of a decade in the past. Leaders at each stage should now perceive the business ecosystem and easy methods to transfer with the velocity and urgency that China is setting.
It was clear that Deputy Secretary Hicks understands the necessity for many of if not all these and extra. Sadly, given the DoD finances is actually fastened, creating new Primes and new nationwide champions of the subsequent technology of protection applied sciences turns into a zero-sum recreation. It’s a politically inconceivable drawback for the Protection Division to unravel alone. Adjustments at this scale would require Congressional motion. Exhausting to think about within the polarized political surroundings. However not inconceivable.
These are our challenges for not simply the Gordian Knot Middle for Nationwide Safety Innovation however for our nation. We’ve taken them on, within the phrases of President John F. Kennedy, “not as a result of they’re simple, however as a result of they’re arduous. as a result of that purpose will serve to prepare and measure the most effective of our energies and expertise, as a result of that problem is one which we’re keen to simply accept, one we’re unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
Filed beneath: Gordian Knot Middle for Nationwide Safety Innovation |