Building Trust in Innovation Practices
During a pause it is, as with agile development methods, critical to include stakeholders in the assessment of the questions and their answers. This implies there exist stakeholders with a vested interest in the pilot prior to the undertaking of the pilot effort. These pauses for evaluation should reinvigorate the stakeholder’ s engagement and interest. This leads pilot development to care about showing progress and being able to demonstrate plans and alternatives when progress may be hindered. If all is going well, stakeholders can boost the effort by allocating further funds and resources, championing it to others, and celebrating the team. If things go poorly, the stakeholders can help identify the need to reassess, identify alternatives, or avoid sunk cost fallacy [ 8 ].
5 REFRAMING RISK
A & D remains among the most risk-averse industries. When operational scenarios include space launches, search and rescue, military engagements, and other matters of life and death, these mission critical systems must not fail. In addition, military electronics and the platforms they are integrated into have long life cycles on the order of 10 to 20 years or more while addressing diminishing manufacturing sources and material shortages( DMSMS). Applying the same standard to new concepts and technologies, however, can stunt progress or even prematurely end them.
While risks must be anticipated and managed, it is necessary to adapt expectations of them when it comes to innovation. The standard practices of avoid, transfer, mitigate, or accept risk still hold true. However, the tolerances need to be more open to foster the uncertainties of new technology development. This is not as simple as loosening standards for safety and security in the name of discovery. Risks in exploring innovative ideas should be viewed as opportunities to find new approaches, solutions, and perspectives.
As an example of trends towards risk aversion, and how an innovation framework may need to differ from general business practice towards such, consider the development of the Air Force’ s recent X-51 program to the X-15 from the 1960s [ 10 ]. This demonstrates the industry’ s dramatic swing toward risk aversion. Design iteration on the X-15 happened frequently, with test flights roughly every two weeks for a total of 199 flights over 9 years [ 11 ]. This versus just 4 test flights over 3 years for the X-51. The X-15 program lost one aircraft and one pilot, both unfortunate but not unheard of in new fighter development. However, despite erring on the side of caution, the long delays between flights for the X-51 led to their launch vehicle’ s retirement from service as well as more than 70 % of the program ground crew departing, taking away their many years of expertise with them.
This example illustrates an overcorrection towards risk. Some see the X-15 program as taking too much risk. Many see the X-51 as not taking enough. A deeper look might show an increased utilization of digital processes and data on the latter program as an innovative discriminator for risk management. A successful innovation framework has methods of measuring and understanding risks. These will not likely align with the same measures for normal business.
114 May 2025