Setting Sail on Navy Innovation: The Who, What, Why, and How
Greg Glaros is the Senior Vice President of Enterprise Services at BMNT Inc. He is the former Chief Executive Officer and founder of SYNEXXUS, Inc. an American Electronic System Design, Manufacturing, and Lead System Integration Company. Before founding SYNEXXUS, he served in the U.S. Navy as a Strike/Fighter Pilot for twenty years and qualified Surface Warfare Officer.
Gregory Glaros
Founder and CEO of SYNEXXUS
Bio | LinkedIn
France Hoang is a veteran entrepreneur who has been on the founding teams of companies that have generated over $600 million of combined sales and employed over 1,200 professionals across the fields of law, aerospace, defense, government services, and technology. France also has over 20 years of national security experience, with service in every branch of the U.S. Government.
France Hoang
Chair of the Board of Advisors
Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of boodleAI
Bio | LinkedIn
“We optimize for the known, but we need to innovate for the unknown.”
Those who serve in the military may become familiar with an old British adage: we do not have enough resources, so we must think. Our enemies are also wise to this; in Iraq, militants strapped explosive devices to drones to kill U.S. troops and damage some of our more sophisticated machinery. There’s power in thinking outside of the box.
For the past 60 years, the U.S. military has operated without peers. Our wealth of resources allowed us to produce at a rapid rate, which is ultimately what led to our win in the Pacific in the 1940s. We had to endure and survive, and as a result, pushed ourselves to innovate incrementally.
But the world has changed while bureaucracy has grown, and the practices that made us the dominant force back then will not serve us in the next thirty years. We can no longer win based on logistical capacity -- we need innovative solutions. That can only happen if we capture and support innovative minds.
The Army, Air Force, Marines, and subdivisions such as submariners and SEALs are waking up to this and taking action -- but the surface Navy has wallowed. And what they stand to lose if they do not integrate the same entrepreneurial, innovative, and disruptive mindset is substantial.
With 1.3 billion people and a rapidly expanding Navy, China now has unlimited resources; they are doing exactly what we did in the Pacific decades ago, except they have six times the capacity today than we did then. In April, they launched three new warships in a single day.
So now we must think.
To realistically compete against our adversaries, and with the Pacific as our most pressing concern, we need to move beyond the arsenal of democracy and into the arsenal of innovation. How do we do that?
First, it’s important to understand that the Navy has long operated on efficiency -- which can be a natural deterrent to innovation in certain scenarios. Every rucksack is packed the same way, with the same items, in the same places. That makes sense for rucksacks, but it doesn’t make sense for the bigger things. There has long been a tension between innovation and standardization because innovation requires repeated failure and wasted resources. But not innovating will cost far more than dollars lost through experimentation.
Thinking in terms of efficiency, then, we need to examine what role entrepreneurial thinking has in optimizing the Navy, what disruption looks like in a naval context, and when it’s appropriate. That requires innovative minds trained by experienced disruptors.
We strongly believe (and experience has taught us) that a key part of that strategy lies in education, making service academies a natural starting point. To enhance the creative prowess of our force, we must invest in our future military leaders at the junior officer level and mandate formal education in entrepreneurship, innovation, and disruption. By starting from the bottom up we can change, for the long-term, the whole culture of the military in a way that keeps efficiency when it works and breaks from efficiency when it stifles progress. This has already proven successful in West Point’s STEDI program, as well as with the Air Force’s SBIR program, which funds disruptive startups like Shift5 for future benefit.
This approach has also proven effective outside of the military. The Hacking For Defense program, which is rooted in the principles of Business Model Generation and Lean LaunchPad methodology, has essentially systemized the disruption process. Presenting students with real-life military problems -- in partnership with public and private sector mentors and partners -- the program has generated scalable solutions for both commercial and government organizations. It encourages fire-in-their-belly students to tackle challenges using different ways of thinking, and then teaches them how to close the gap between ideation and execution. Not to mention, navigate the inevitable tension between efficiency and innovation.
If the surface Navy brought a similar program to its service academies, it would undoubtedly graduate individuals who could effectively identify where the status quo isn’t working, have the courage to say it, and understand what it would take to find a better answer. Establishing an educational program that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, and disruptive thinking will develop future leaders who advocate against change for the sake of it and work to better understand where change is actually needed. That is essentially what Hacking For Defense does -- it prepares tomorrow’s leaders to optimize for the known but innovate for the unknown.
The great strength of the Department of Defense has always been that each of its war fighting branches are culturally designed to solve different kinds of problems in the future, and they are utilized for that purpose. But in the modern military, one thing is abundantly clear: the United States can be out-innovated. And our most valuable military branch in this scenario -- the Navy -- has been resistant to the creative thinking we need to prevent that from happening.
We are moving closer to a time when the US economy and force size will be surpassed by near peer competitors. To re-establish our edge in innovation, our future relies on reassessing what is required to achieve superiority -- which is now a question of technical imagination, not efficiency in production or deployment. The quickest and most validated path to get to that strategic advantage is through investing in the quality of our surface Navy, which has unlimited (and as yet untapped) potential to produce innovative, adaptive, and entrepreneurial service men and women. What, exactly, are we waiting for?