It was an honor to host US Deputy Secretary of Protection Dr. Kathleen Hicks at Stanford’s Gordian Knot Heart 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 lively obligation, 750,000 civilians, ~800,000 within the Nationwide Guard and Reserves.)
She got here to the Gordian Knot Heart to debate our distinctive strategy 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 accomplice with and leverage the U.S. innovation ecosystem to resolve 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, downside 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 might be wanted and needed. We identified that Silicon Valley and Stanford have achieved this for 50 years. And China is outpacing us by adopting the very innovation strategies we invented, integrating industrial know-how with tutorial analysis, and delivering it to the Peoples Liberation Military.
Therein lies the main target of our Gordian Knot Heart —join STEM with coverage training and leverage the synergies between the 2 to develop progressive leaders who perceive know-how and coverage and might remedy issues and ship options at velocity and scale.
What We Offered
A key part of the Gordian Knot Heart’s mission is to arrange and encourage future leaders to contribute meaningfully as a part of the innovation work pressure. We mix the distinctive strengths of Stanford and its location in Silicon Valley to resolve 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 industrial know-how ecosystem
- Our expertise in speedy downside understanding, speedy iteration and deployment of options with velocity and urgency
- Entry to danger capital at scale
Within the six months since we based the Gordian Knot Heart we have now targeted on six initiatives we needed to share with Secretary Hicks. Reasonably 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 – Know-how, Innovation and Nice Energy Competitors
- Protection Innovation Students Program – 25 college students now, 50 by the tip of the 12 months
- Coverage Affect and Outreach –ONR Hedge Technique, NSC Quad Rising Know-how Observe 1.5 Convention
- Internships and Skilled Workforce Growth – Innovation Workforce Vignettes
For those who 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 advised 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 folks.
It was encouraging to listen to the phrases.
Nonetheless, from the place we sit..
- Our nationwide safety is now inexorably intertwined with industrial know-how and is hindered by our lack of an built-in technique on the highest degree.
- Our adversaries have exploited the boundaries and borders between our protection and industrial 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 critical if we wish to hold abreast of our adversaries. This might 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 industrial tech (nuclear, hypersonics,…). Make it everlasting by creating innovation doctrine/coverage.
Create new nationwide champions in dual-use industrial tech – AI/ML, Quantum, Area, drones, excessive efficiency computing, subsequent gen networking, autonomy, biotech, underwater autos, shipyards, and so forth. who should not the standard distributors. Do that by choosing winners. Don’t give out door prizes. Contracts needs to be >$100M so high- high quality venture-funded firms will play. Till we have now new distributors on the Main Protection Acquisition Program checklist, all we have now within the DoD is innovation theater – not innovation.
Purchase at Pace. As we speak, the common DoD main acquisition program takes 9-26 years to get a weapon within the fingers of a warfighter. We’d like a necessities, budgeting and acquisition course of that operates at industrial velocity (18 months or much less) which is 10x sooner than DoD procurement cycles. As an alternative of writing necessities, DoD ought to quickly assess options and have interaction warfighters in assessing and prototyping industrial options.
Combine and incent the Enterprise Capital/Personal Fairness ecosystem to take a position at scale. Ask funders what it will take to take a position at scale – e.g. create large 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 individuals 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 completely different mindsets and approaches than these we confronted within the twentieth century. As we speak’s senior DoD leaders should assume and act otherwise than their predecessors of a decade in the past. Leaders at each degree should now perceive the industrial ecosystem and tips on how 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 basically 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 unimaginable downside for the Protection Division to resolve alone. Adjustments at this scale would require Congressional motion. Laborious to think about within the polarized political setting. However not unimaginable.
These are our challenges for not simply the Gordian Knot Heart 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 straightforward, however as a result of they’re arduous. as a result of that purpose will serve to arrange and measure one of the best of our energies and abilities, as a result of that problem is one which we’re keen to just accept, one we’re unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
Filed below: Gordian Knot Heart for Nationwide Safety Innovation |
