Innovation Management¶

August 28, 2023
in Defense Technology, Innovation Management, Operating Models
3 min read

Replicator is an organizational test of speed and scale

The Department of Defense (DoD) has announced the Replicator initiative, an effort to field attritable autonomous systems in multiple domains at a scale of thousands within 18 to 24 months. The goal is intentionally aggressive. It is meant not only to deliver systems, but to demonstrate a repeatable way to move relevant technology into warfighters' hands faster.

Replicator will be discussed as an autonomy and manufacturing challenge. It is equally an organizational-design challenge.

August 15, 2023
in Defense Technology, Systems Engineering, Innovation Management
3 min read

Lunar infrastructure starts with interoperability

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced the 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) capability study. The effort will examine how a future lunar economy might move from isolated, self-sufficient projects toward shareable and scalable infrastructure for power, communications, logistics, and other services.

The timing of that architectural work matters. Interoperability is easiest to praise before systems exist and hardest to achieve after every provider has optimized a private solution.

August 9, 2023
in Cybersecurity, Defense Technology, Innovation Management
3 min read

AI cyber defense needs a transition path

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), a two-year competition aimed at using artificial intelligence to find and fix vulnerabilities in widely used software. Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and the Open Source Security Foundation are participating in the effort, with competitions planned around DEF CON.

The challenge is ambitious for good reason. Software underpins critical infrastructure, and human defenders cannot manually inspect every dependency at the speed new vulnerabilities appear. The difficult work will begin when a winning technique meets a real maintainer's backlog.

July 31, 2023
in Defense Technology, AI Assurance, Innovation Management
3 min read

Trustworthy AI needs a research agenda, not a slogan

Researchers from academia, industry, and government are gathering this week for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Forward workshop. The agenda centers on a question that is easy to state and difficult to engineer: how can AI systems operate reliably, interact appropriately with people, and support national-security needs under demanding conditions?

Calling a system trustworthy does not make it so. Trustworthiness has to be decomposed into research questions, engineering evidence, and operational learning.

April 20, 2023
in AI Strategy, Innovation Management, Organizational Learning
3 min read

Research integration is an organizational-design problem

Google has combined DeepMind and the Google Brain team into a new unit called Google DeepMind. The stated ambition is to bring together talent, computing resources, infrastructure, and research advances to accelerate progress in artificial intelligence.

Mergers of technical groups are often described as exercises in scale. Their success depends just as much on whether distinct communities can combine knowledge without losing the differences that made each one valuable.