Holistic Innovation: Using Networks to Engineer Success

Lt Col JJ Snow, USSOCOM Donovan Group Innovation Officer/SOFWERX

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in this article are the my own and do not reflect the view of the Donovan Group, SOFWERX, USSOCOM, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” ~Albert Einstein

Networks are a key component in the foundation of any successful innovation platform. They bring outside diversity and fresh perspectives inside to benefit the organization. They encourage people to speak openly. They are not bound by organizational constraints which means they can be brutally honest in their perspectives on specific processes or projects without fear of reprisal and can also be the catalyst to open difficult but important discussions. They can bring additional capacity to bear in times of crises or times of acceleration. They offer a spectrum of expertise typically not found within the organization. They may also offer access to specific communities, technologies or spaces that the organization would never be able to gain admission to on its own. For small budgets, networks are especially important because they can make up for a lack of dollars by providing teams with the ability to tap into resources that money can’t always buy: decentralized power, crowd sourced knowledge, creativity, and open source solution spaces.

One of the first lessons I learned during my time at SOFWERX is that getting the right people on the team is what will lead to the creation of the right networks. The robustness of the SOFWERX innovation platform is due in large part to the team of people staffing it which in turn drove the networks that have chosen to form around it. The SOFWERX 24-person team supports innovation efforts for 70,000 special operations forces members globally. Established as a Partnership Intermediary Agreement (www.sofwerx.org/faq_cat/partnership-intermediary-agreement-pia/) the SOFWERX platform is able to operate on behalf of USSOCOM as an intermediary organization to help accelerate technology transfer, rapidly iterate on new technology solutions, facilitate fast prototyping, experimentation events, and hackathons, reduce friction for projects moving into both FAR and non-FAR based funding opportunities and provides a public physical and virtual space to bring together innovators from government, industry, academia, and non-traditional communities such as ethical hackers to solve the toughest challenges facing special operations and national security today. This small 24-person team functions like a group of “tour guides” that are available to users to answer questions, follow up on projects and help make smart connections between problem owners and solution bringers. It is important to note that the team doesn’t direct how a user should engage with the platform, instead allowing users to decide for themselves how to best collaborate based on their own unique goals and priorities.

A second important lesson is to make the innovation platform agnostic to technology and people. This is one of the more powerful aspects of innovation platforming because this openness allows for large number of diverse networks to successfully come together to leverage a common space. As an example, the current networks owned by SOFWERX include a 630 person ethical hacker, maker, transhumanist and biohacker network (the only one of its kind in the Department of Defense or big government today), a 470 interagency action officer open email distro which features government, academic and laboratory partners all who have chosen to openly share information to facilitate positive cross government collaboration, a growing (8300+) industry partner network which includes top strategists, innovation officers and global CEOs who believe in the SOFWERX platform and are helping to drive innovation inside of government, a diverse network of venture capitalists and accelerators who vector technologies of interest to the command and assist in growing nascent technologies to support special operations, university partnerships which now span 77 U.S. and International Universities and Colleges ranging from Ivy League to Technical schools, multiple innovation partners and centers across NATO, the UN and the World Economic Forum working on smart technology policy and forecasting and finally the special operations forces network who provide critical inputs from the operators to guide ongoing SOFWERX projects. This type of comprehensive network ecosystem and participant diversity is only possible when an innovation platform is truly open and available to everyone to use and benefit from. That’s why SOFWERX is not behind guards, gates, and guns, why the model is non-profit based and why we discourage things like wearing a uniform which can deter certain partners from even coming through the door and prevent important creative discussions from happening. Being mindful of the types of creative thinkers you hope to draw as participants means setting the right environment for innovation success. Understanding the culture and mindset of these communities is key to ensuring they feel welcome and included as part of the team.

It takes time and effort to build a holistic networked ecosystem and to sustain it. To my knowledge, no other innovation entity in the U.S. Department of Defense or big government has a networked ecosystem as diverse as SOFWERX. But they certainly could and probably should, especially if they are serious about innovating. Here’s why:

1)     Networks help drive the innovation cycle; SOFWERX is like a hydroelectric facility and the networks we team with are the Niagara Falls of ideas – 80% of what flows through may not be solutions we are looking for but that other 20% are pure gold and these ideas in turn power more new ideas.

2)     By providing an open collaborative space for creative collisions, SOFWERX brings people together who normally wouldn’t team up at all; combining ethical hackers with Department of Homeland Security and Special Operations has helped to rapidly platform opportunities to share critical and actionable open source cyber intelligence; a joint team of SOFWERX, Asymmetric Warfare Group and the drone hacker community has resulted in a new approach to countering malicious or ignorant drone operators who may pose a threat to airfield operations.

3)     The assortment of networks participating in the platform increases the diversity of knowledge, skills and abilities available to all users; this intrinsic value draws additional experts in to collaborate because everyone who contributes or uses the platform also benefits from those interactions at the same time.

4)     Networks are free. They don’t require extensive resources, high dollar investments or significant organizational change or restructuring. In most cases they don’t even require a physical location, most of the collaboration can occur online via tools like Slack.

5)     Networks are powerful. When allowed to remain open, decentralized, and diverse, knowledge is easily diffused, and participation levels are consistently high resulting in peak performance and positive collaboration to drive innovation to the next level.

In the last year, the networks teaming with SOFWERX have achieved amazing results. One of the more interesting projects has been the development of an anonymous cyber drop box which allows hackers and makers to responsibly disclose potential cyber threats to the government without fear of reprisal. This process brings together DEFCON black badge hackers (ethical hackers who have earned life time membership at DEFCON for finding serious vulnerabilities in critical systems), legal and technical advisors from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, USSOCOM, SOFWERX and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This is an unprecedented collaboration between entities that normally have huge trust barriers and typically would not be seen working together. But because of the openness of the platform, SOFWERX was able to provide the space for this type of rare innovation to thrive. The DEFCON team has agreed to build, test and maintain an anonymous “responsible disclosure” system while DHS has agreed to be the government recipient for this information and share information across government via their National Cyber Security and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), a 24/7 cyber situational awareness, incident response and crises management center that ties state, federal, international law enforcement together with military and intelligence community partners. The goal of this partnership is to create a longstanding network to proactively address cyber vulnerabilities before they become a problem and that could in fact change the way we respond to cyber events in the foreseeable future.

Another short-term project that was conducted with hacker partners and showcased the ability to rapidly surge extra capacity to support project acceleration was the Naval Postgraduate School Advanced Digital Advisor Partnering Technologies (ADAPT) & Remote Advise and Assist Concept (RAA). ADAPT/RAA was designed to allow Iraqi forces a reachback capability to ask a U.S. special operator or military advisor for advice while conducting security operations in the field. Built almost entirely on open source and commercial off the shelf components, the teams knew there were vulnerabilities but weren’t sure exactly what all of them were. SOFWERX was able to share the details of the system to its hacker and maker network. In just 48 hours seven hackers came back with all of the vulnerabilities as well as all the ways to harden the system for free, ensuring this life saving technology was kept operational and secure.

SOFWERX was able to leverage its openness in another way: teaming with international partners and industry to solve tough challenges. The Individual Air Mobility System came out of a partnership with French CEO Franky Zapata, owner of Zapata Racing. Over the course of a year SOFWERX teamed up with Zapata Racing first to get France to allow the team to come to the U.S. to demonstrate their capability and then to conduct field trials and rapid iterations to meet specific operator requirements. From August to October the two teams came together to create an improved platform capable of carrying 350lbs up to 11 miles at a max speed of 80 miles per hour with a 12 minute flight time. The team also was able to make the platform exceptionally intuitive, and operators were able gain basic proficiency in one hour (www.sofwerx.org/iams). This kind of speed only happens when one allows for decentralized, open collaboration in which a broad spectrum of participants are free to operate in the way that works best for them, allowed to fail and learn quickly and have the top cover necessary to facilitate next level creative thinking.

SOFWERX Industry partners have also been providing enthusiastic feedback on their ability to easily interface and collaborate with multiple government organizations thanks to the diverse networks and openness of the platform. A recent example of this comes from Mike Canty, CEO of ARC, who participated in a SOFWERX event and used the platform to get his solution out to the most relevant groups across government. ARC allows operators to automate and fuse events and data with ease whether on the battlefield or across global logistics and supply chains, providing real time visibility on personnel, equipment and materials. USSOCOM PEO SOF Warrior and G8 S&T are working with ARC on their solutions while US Marine Corps Logistics Vision and Strategy Branch are finalizing a CRADA to add this capability to their “Smart Logistics” portfolio contributing to automated ammunition resupply and predictive maintenance requirements. TRANSCOM is talking with ARC as well and two of our accelerators have already identified multiple additional government and private sector contacts that have challenges they believe this technology can help to solve. These connections were made in weeks instead of months because of the agile networks collaborating in, through and around the SOFWERX platform.

By networking with University of Southern Florida (USF) SOFWERX has also harnessed the creative power of local college and high school students to drive innovation in new spaces. USF maintains a full-time facilitator at SOFWERX to oversee the student intern program and guide specific projects of interest to the command. Most recently, SOFWERX installed its first clean room with USF to enable the onsite construction and testing of micro and nanosatellite concepts for the command. The students working in this area are taking space science to the next level by building new nanosatellite prototypes, figuring out how to use commercial off the shelf technology to design effective yet affordable payloads and looking at how space will play a pivotal role in tactical operations for the future. To date, the team has launched four satellites into orbit for testing and are in the process of building two more for launch in early September.

SOFWERX is the hub for technology community events in Tampa. Infragard Alliance and ISSA recently held a 150-person workshop onsite open to their members and the military which afforded participants continuing education credits. A local counter-threat finance group meets several times a month in SOFWERX spaces to talk about open source solutions and developing threat trends. The local First Robotics competition is one of the more popular events hosted and draws in innovative high school robotics experts to demonstrate their inventions every year. Many other groups take advantage of the open collaborative space to host a variety of innovation events to benefit the local community while also educating and informing the command on the latest technology developments. Virtually SOFWERX hosts multiple open collaborative sites on Slack, GitHub, Docker, TeamWerx (for hackathons) and YouTube with a new “instructables” solution site coming online this spring that will showcase innovative solutions that anyone in the government can download and build to support their operations.

Together these networks and the people who make them up are the most precious resource of the SOFWERX innovation platform. Our networks really make us who and what we are and also dictate the level of success we are able to achieve. It is not unusual for visitors to offer resources in the form of dollars but what SOFWERX would rather have is more creative, open minded, positive people who want to share and make a difference. Money will not help get the solutions we are looking for, people will. “Money makes for lazy innovators” was the mantra of our founder Jim “Hondo” Geurts and he was right. If you have lots of capital you are more likely to buy solutions rather than actually do the innovation part yourself. Stay small, stay open, don’t worry about who gets the credit and focus on making a difference. Put the right people in place on your staff and they in turn will drive the right networks to form around your platform. The people who are truly passionate about making a difference will show up if you create the right environment.

I’d love to hear what you and your organization are doing to drive innovation via networks so please post your thoughts and comments below so that we can all continue to learn from each other as innovators and positive #ChangeAgents – something you are doing for your organization might be exactly the solution someone else on here has been looking for to help get started – thanks for sharing!