Building Trust in Innovation Practices
Throughout history, humans have been in a perpetual race to invent new and better ways to fight and defend. As sticks and stones became guns and bombs and tribes gave way to nations, this race ran ever forward. From time to time, some runners would surge ahead, and some would fall behind. Occasionally, surprises, unexpected alliances or betrayals, leaps or stumbles, or other events have redefined the competition, but the contest continues today. This race applies directly to the aerospace & defense( A & D) industry.
As technology progresses it becomes necessary for those involved to protect innovative ideas and capabilities. Innovation is vital to the security of nations and their people [ 1 ]. Being able to acquire another country’ s latest technology before it is implemented is often worth the effort. As such, competitive disadvantages have driven espionage to new heights, as more sophisticated nations become targets for theft of technology. To complicate this, innovative ideas often require very open conversations and experiments. This makes it difficult to be innovative in security constrained environments as change in business processes can introduce security risks and may require changes in security.
Thus, as vital as innovation is to A & D, it must be balanced with trust and reliability. It is easy to go too far into risk-aversion, raising instead the risk of falling behind, and correcting course can present a daunting proposition. Presented here is a discussion on how risk-averse industries like A & D enable innovation without compromising security and safety. Much of this relies on establishing a business framework which builds trust in innovation practices.
1 BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT( BLUF)
While innovation frameworks [ 2 ] are a well-explored concept, a focused and comprehensive, coordinated, and interconnected innovation framework is key to successful innovation in highly regulated, high security, risk-averse industries including A & D. The idea of an innovation framework for defense is not new – an article in the 2021 Journal of Strategic Studies [ 3 ] sets a strong stage for such a framework, looking at several innovation factors, the relationships between them, and expected outcomes.
Accordingly, such a framework should incorporate multiple components to address concerns and requirements from diverse perspectives. This business framework includes leveraging innovation beyond the company, providing resources to support innovation, employing methods to identify potential success in innovation while not fearing failure, the ability to recognize when the time to pursue an innovation is best, and advocating and encouraging innovation throughout the company. Each of these topics will be discussed in the following sections. This proposed innovation framework came out of extensive studies and over a decade of leadership in innovation at Raytheon and A & D.
Journal of Innovation 107