Herding cats with the biggest carrots...incentives for teamwork
The innovation ecosystem can seem to be a chaotic fog with many players stumbling blindly trying to find their way to seemingly lost finish line. What is most needed is teamwork to align common needs with common goals and pooled resources. But how do you bring participants together when you might not have the usual tools of a military hierarchy to fall back on to force a cohesive game plan? It all relies on one magic word...incentives!
When trying to incentivize the individual players it helps to understand the primary motivations. Industry is looking for business. Academia is looking for research. Military organizations are looking for capability. Giving the right incentives to the various players is the key to bringing together a cohesive development team. Starting with an operational need that is defined by an end user, so that there is a capability based goal that an end user understands is being addressed (their need being met). Utilizing Academia to provide expertise to understand the most current state of the art of the potential solution space to define the solution goal (using experts to help refine the requirement). Then soliciting industry for a product or developmental solution, also possibly pairing with Academia in the process, to deliver a new solution to the end user (awarding funding for R&D and/or Procurement). It is this process of utilizing everyone's applicable strengths and underlying desires through the alignment of incentives that brings the larger team together.
This may seem like all fanciful talk of when endless timelines and unlimited funding meets distant desires, but I would argue that all that is required is a common priority to utilize this process at speed. All the R&D and acquisition toolsets exist to do this today to execute these rapid and unified projects. If everyone understands the mission priority, then all that's needed is an organizing manager to align the incentives and manage the project. This is very commonly seen in the Special Operations community through their R&D efforts with great success. After multiple decades of Counter Insurgency operations, the question becomes can we take the lessons learned from the SOF community and apply them to the broader DoD to achieve similar success in great power competitions of the future? What we need for the future is that same ruthless pursuit of effectiveness that the SOF community is known for, executed by our current breed of Program Managers within the rest of DoD. Who is willing to standup in the Acquisition community and say...Follow Me!
