T-shirts from a 2021 hackathon run by the Naval Facilities Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center and the Ventura County (Calif.) Office of Education. Palmer Pinckney II
The Navy wants to crowdsource innovation
CTO urges the Navy Department to hold more “structured challenges” to spur breakthroughs.
Two decades ago, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research agency jump-started an industry-wide scramble for self-driving cars with a pair of contests. These DARPA Grand Challenges led to events that sought breakthroughs in urban robots, mapping tunnels, and even space launch.
The notion that militarily useful innovation can be crowdsourced has since taken broader root in the forms of contests, hackathons, and more. Now the Navy wants to push its own “structured challenges” into overdrive.
A May 25 memo from acting Chief Technical Officer Justin Fanelli directs the Department of the Navy to “adopt more broadly” the use of contests “to solve specific problems or explore innovative solutions.”
“For example, one of the Navy Systems Commands organized a data challenge that asked interested participants to demonstrate how they were innovating with data and analytics; another command held an Innovation Olympics that challenged people to show how they were using Power BI, Power Apps, or Power Automation to innovate and improve everyday work life,” Fanelli wrote.
His memo lays out a few guidelines intended to make it easier to mount, run, and capture useful lessons from such events. For example, organizers should “Maintain detailed records and documentation in a designated DON CIO location to provide easy access to information and support knowledge sharing across the organization, including the sharing of challenge best practices.”
Oh, and don’t forget to give the winners money, or at least an attaboy. As Fanelli writes, “Create prize challenges where possible, which will increase motivation for participants.”
Correction: An earlier version of this report gave the wrong title for Justin Fanelli.