Research Summaries

Back Innovation Leadership

Fiscal Year 2021
Division Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences
Department Computer Science
Investigator(s) Denning, Peter J.
Sponsor Naval Sea Systems Command (Navy)
Summary The Secretary of Defense and every Service Chief have identified military innovation as a requirement in the face of increasingly innovative state and non-state adversaries. Innovation can emerge when any individual, regardless of rank, takes leadership to respond to a community concern, mobilize people to help, and navigate through the general "fog of uncertainty" that engulfs innovation projects. winter Every service member can be an innovation leader. Our current common sense tells us that innovation is a form of invention that penetrates a marketplace. It tells us that innovation is hard to achieve, requires prodigious effort, and takes a long time. It tells us to focus on creative thinking, careful planning, and strong management. This story makes innovation leadership seem like hard, possibly unsatisfying work performed by a few iron-fisted genius heroes who were lucky enough to be in the right places at the right times. This common sense does not work well: its success rate is a meager 4%. We begin with a new "common sense" founded on the idea that innovation is the adoption of a new practice in a community. Innovation leaders embody eight essential, learnable practices through which they generate adoption. The leaders foster the conversations in which the requests, promises, offers, declarations, assessments, and assertions of the eight practices take place. They are wayfinders to new desired community outcomes. They are mobilizers of complex networks. These leaders find daily satisfaction from growing the community who adopt a new way that matters to them. As part of your work in this course you will design and execute an innovation project for your community that will be part of the next five to ten years of your career.
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Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal