Military Review English Edition July-August 2014 | Page 51
CULTURE OF INNOVATION
incubator to insource innovation. It supports service members working to provide viable solutions
to real problems where they can and how they can.
Additionally, prospective entrepreneurs can draw on
the wisdom and experience of more seasoned innovators who can help them develop practical approaches
to implementing their ideas within the context of a
skeptical bureaucracy.
Conclusion
The bureaucratic nature of our military is useful to
provide for our common defense and has been sufficiently so for over 200 years. Unfortunately, this bureaucracy
can severely restrict innovation. Like many peripheral
networks of the past, the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum
has sought to provide its participants an environment
free from bureaucratic burdens and blind spots. This kind
of environment should be replicated in other avenues to
support the creation of a culture of innovation, one in
which ideas complement the existing institutional
bureaucracy. Within its loose confines, the Defense
Entrepreneurs Forum provides a hub for innovation
where self-identified entrepreneurs can support one
another through informal, peripheral networks. The
Defense Entrepreneurs Forum is autonomous and free
from parochial interest. It provides an adaptive, no-cost,
fail-for-free environment where ideas can be discussed,
experiments can be designed and tested, and ventures
can be discarded if appropriate, so entrepreneurs can
push workable solutions to the DOD.
Notes
1. Edward Cox, Grey Emminence: Fox Connor and the Art of
Mentorship (AUSA Institute of Land Warfare, 2010), 11-12.
2. George S. Patton, “Comments on the Cavalry Tanks”, Cavalry
Journal, July 1921.
3. Carlo D-Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, LLC, 2002), 151-152.
4. Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When
New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston, MA: Harvard
Business School, 1997).
5. RAND documented briefing, prepared for the U.S. Army,
Predicting Military Innovation, by Jeffrey A. Isaacson, Christopher
Layne, and John Arquilla (Washington, DC: RAND Arroyo Center,
1999), http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB242.
html.
6. This aphorism comes from the quote, “a true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention,” Plato, The Republic,
Robin Waterfield, translator, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 59.
MILITARY REVIEW July-August 2014
7. Information for these organizations is available at http://
www.techstars.com, http://i-lab.harvard.edu, and http://dschool.
stanford.edu.
8. Nathan K. Finney, Jeff Gilmore, Benjamin Kohlmann, and
Lindsay Rodman, “Fostering Military Entrepreneurs,” Armed
Forces Journal, August 2013, http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/
fostering-military-entrepreneurs/.
9. Visit the Defense Entrepreneur Forum website at http://
defenseentrepreneurs.org. We invite innovators to join us at the
2014 gathering of the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum, University of
Chicago, 24-26 October 2014.
10. Charles E. White, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst
and the Militärische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801-1805 (Westport:
Praeger, 1988), 30.
11. Ibid, 31, 49.
12. The authors are indebted to Lt. Cmdr. B.J. Armstrong for
his support and personal work on William Sims and the gunnery revolution. More information on his work can be found
at the U.S. Naval Institute, beginning here: http://blog.usni.
org/2012/06/08/a-junior-officer-and-a-discovery.
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