Sometimes Innovation Success Is Finding Out Someone Did It Already

“ATC Strip Boards are a relic of the past, but are also mandated for use by the [Federal Aviation Administration] unless the Tower invests millions of dollars in a state of the art system. Without that kind of awesome funding, manual Strip Boards is it!”

That’s the start of the description for a VISION initiative to 3D print air traffic control strip boards—think the little nameplates that show who is in or out of an office, but in this case they hold strips of paper that track instructions given from air traffic controllers to aircraft.?

As the introduction says, they’re a bit antiquated, and they’re also hard to come by. According to the initiative’s author, there is currently only one company that produces them, and the going rate is five dollars each, with minimum orders of a hundred strip boards.?

From an innovation perspective, this one is pretty straightforward. Anyone with a 3D printer and the right skills can mock one up and print it for about fifteen cents each … which is exactly what happened.?

That’s not why we bring this story to you.

"Cross-pollinate Ideas"

This initiative really highlights the value of VISION in connecting people with solutions and deduplicating efforts across organizations. Every base with an airfield has an air traffic control tower, and each of them is required by the FAA to have these strip boards. That means there are people all across the world with the same requirement and likely with the same question: is there a better way? One of those people happened to be at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida.

1st Lt. In Bok Lee is the deployment and distribution flight commander for the 45th Logistics Readiness Squadron.?

“I was told, ‘Hey, look into VISION—it’s a great platform where we cross-pollinate ideas, where we're able to share some of the things that each base is working on,'” he said. Lee had been an intern with the base’s Spark Cell, called The Forge, which got him interested in innovation.

His unit absorbed the airfield operations function for the base. So, out of curiosity, he scrolled through VISION to look at related projects. It wasn’t until it came up in a staff meeting that his unit needed to purchase new strip boards that he remembered seeing a similar initiative.

“And so I was like, ‘Wait, why don't we just do this where we download the file, go 3D print it, and make a hundred of them?’” he recalled. “Now you're able to save $500 from there.”

That’s exactly what they did. And just like that, a solution that originated at Travis Air Force Base, California, was used for the same problem on the other side of the country.?

VISION Lets You Explore What's Possible

What does Lee say is the real value here? Time.

“I was able to just download the file,” he said, noting he didn’t have to go out and design the solution himself.?

“Everybody doesn't need to be an innovator. I think everybody just needs to be aware of the innovation that's going on.”

There’s plenty of innovation going on. If you haven't used the VISION Joint Innovation System, you can learn more about it here.

Already have an account? Did you know you can sort through the nearly 3,500 initiatives in VISION by functional area to see what ideas are happening in your career field? Take a look at what’s out there—someone may have already solved a problem you haven’t even considered yet.?