Navy's R&D Wing is Building a Lean, Mean Innovation Machine

As sports coaches and self-help books have said for decades, the first step to fixing any problem is recognizing what it is.

And Rich Carlin thinks the military’s research and development efforts could benefit from digging a bit deeper into issues before looking for a solution.

Carlin, who leads the Sea Warfare and Weapons Department at the Office of Naval Research, is spearheading an effort to standardize the office’s approach to developing new technology. The initiative, dubbed Naval Innovation Process Adoption, is rooted in a problem-solving method called H4X, which distills business and design principles commonly used by startups and entrepreneurs into a structured system for innovation.

ONR currently treats different categories of R&D as entirely separate enterprises, Carlin told Nextgov. Basic research, applied research, small business partnerships and other avenues for innovation each operate under their own unique processes and procedures, and through NIPA, Carlin aims to provide the Navy and Marine Corps with a similar “process for innovation” among those different siloes.

As an organization, ONR doesn’t perform R&D itself, but rather invests in technologies on behalf of the Navy and Marine Corps. As an intermediary between the Pentagon and private contractors, it’s critical that ONR both understands the problem at hand and articulates it clearly to industry.

But breaking down the Pentagon’s complex issues into questions businesses can answer is a struggle, Carlin said. Without clearly defining the scope of the problem, Carlin said, ONR could waste resources chasing solutions that don’t check all the military’s boxes.

Though it doesn’t provide answers in itself, H4X forces people to get a deeper understanding of the problems at hand and ultimately guides them to better solutions, Carlin said. Through extensive market research, rapid experimentation and prototyping, the process forces groups to constantly reevaluate the problem and look for solutions from many different angles.

H4X is the brainchild of entrepreneur and Stanford University adjunct professor Steve Blank and retired Army Col. Pete Newell, who led the branch’s Rapid Equipping Force.

The methodology served as the basis of a course the two launched at Stanford called Hacking for Defense, where students learned to apply “lean startup” principles to challenges put forward by the Defense Department and intelligence community. Since 2016, they’ve helped launch Hacking for Defense programs at 11 universities around the country, and Newell told Nextgov 11 more universities are preparing to kick off programs next year.

In his current role as a managing partner at Palo Alto-based BMNT Partners, Newell works closely with Carlin to stand up NIPA. He said he intends to take lessons learned from the initial rollout in Carlin’s office to bolster similar programs across ONR.

“We’re really focused on the concept of building innovation pipelines,” Newell said. “The idea isn’t to come in and tell ONR or anybody else to completely change the way they do business, but it’s to look at those things that are getting in the way and say you have to change this or you’re missing something.”

The end goal, he added, is “building a culture within ONR that allows it to essentially manage this process on their own.”

NIPA will operate on a cyclical basis, with researchers applying H4X different problem areas every quarter, Carlin said. The first iteration, which kicked off in late March, is centered on streamlining the acquisition process, and though Carlin said ONR has yet to decide on a focus area of the next round, he listed artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems as potential candidates.

In addition to ONR, Newell and BMNT Partners are also working to integrate the methodology within the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, National Defense University and a number of other government groups.

Though its still in its early days, Newell called NIPA “the most aggressive program” he’s seen in the five years he’s worked to bring H4X to government.

Editor's Note: This article was updated to clarify Steve Blank's title.