A case study of innovation and change in the U.S. Navy Submarine fleet

Abstract

In November of 2011, the United States Navy Submarine Force conducted a revolutionary forum to leverage the technological abilities of the millennial generation in order to further the situational awareness of the sailors in the submarines control room. To facilitate this effort, a design firm was contracted to help understand the needs of the community and to guide the design sessions of the junior officers and enlisted brought in to generate ideas. The result of the forum was an output of several encouraging new methods for displaying information to understand a submarines contact much more rapidly. These new displays also dramatically reduce the time required to train new sailors in their operation. This incident provided an excellent opportunity to investigate the interactions of the Navy, change management and design thinking in the field of information technology. Given the high rate of failure for information technology projects within the Department of Defense, design thinking and change management are examined in this thesis to find possible methods to reduce the losses created by those failures.