New Directions For Defense, A Big Ideas Special Event: Innovation Leadership is a Craft, with Peter Denning and Col. Todd Lyons [video]

Author
Naval Postgraduate School
Denning, Peter J.
Lyons, Todd
Date
2016-12Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The Department of Defense and military services have all expressed grave concern over our ability to lead military innovations in the face of increasingly innovative adversaries. Innovativeness will come from individual leadership through all ranks, not from top-down initiatives. Future promotions will give increasing weight to demonstrated innovation leadership. This course defines a framework for innovation leadership, identifies its skill sets, and teaches them. We envision a military in which every service member is an innovation leader. Our current common sense tells us that innovation is hard to achieve (about 4% of innovation projects succeed), requires prodigious effort (90% of the work is in achieving adoption), and takes a long time (often over 10 years). It tells us to focus on creativity to generate new ideas and careful planning to sell and implement our ideas within our fields of action. This story makes innovation leadership seem like hard, unsatisfying work performed by a few genius-hero leaders who were lucky enough to be in the right places a the right times. We offer a new “common sense” grounded in the ideas that innovation is the adoption of a practice within a community and that there are discrete, learnable skills or practices for leading the innovation process. The innovation skill set consists of eight essential practices through which the leader intentionally generates innovations. Innovation leaders become navigators who find paths from the current world state to a new desired state, and mobilizers of networks of many contributors. Innovation leaders foster the conversations in which the requests, promises, offers, declarations, assessments, and assertions that contribute to adoption take place. This leadership is satisfying and rewarding.
Description
Includes presentation slides
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Collections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
An innovation framework applied to a military cyber professionals association
Billingsley, Joseph L. (Monterey, California: Naval Postgraduate School, 2013-09);Be it on Wall Street, Main Street, or K Street, Americans are concerned about cyber threats, as cyberspace underpins national security and prosperity in the 21st century. The concern is expressed in dinner table discussions, ... -
TEACHING INNOVATION: DESIGNING A CURRICULUM TO CHANGE THE MILITARY
Wieser, Adam B. (Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School, 2020-06);The United States Department of Defense’s relationship with innovation has changed from the Cold War–era paradigm of large defense contractors and government think tanks undertaking the lion’s share of the responsibility ... -
Military Innovation in the Third Age of U.S. Unmanned Aviation, 1991–2015
Grant, Robert L., Jr. (Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School, 2020-06);Military innovation studies have largely relied on monocausal accounts—rationalism, institutionalism, or culture—to explain technologically innovative and adaptive outcomes in defense organizations. None of these ...