Research Summaries

Back Implementing the DoN 30-Year R&D Plan: Creating and Sustaining a Culture That Values Learning, Strategic Agility, Collaboration and Innovation

Fiscal Year 2019
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department NPS Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Thomas, Gail F.
Higgins, Susan L.
Brutzman, Donald P.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary The Department of Navy’s (DoN) first 30-year R&D Plan signed by SECNAV (Jan 2017) is a call to action: the modern battlespace is changing at such a pace that the status quo will not enable victory in the next war. It proposes a strategy to increase our technological advantage & maritime superiority in an increasingly dynamic security environment. The research explores how leaders can implement the strategy by accelerating learning, strategic agility, organizational culture change. A key is to develop a Naval R&D Enterprise (NRDE) workforce to value strategic agility & strategic learning while establishing practices of innovation.

Our approach uses the APAN collaboration portal, Design Thinking (DT), Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging Internet (MMOWGLI) & social network & collaboration analysis to inform the study, catalyze the growth of the strategic thinking community of interest (COI) & promote collaboration across the Plan’s key strategic investment areas: Autonomous Systems, Computing & Sensing, Materials & Manufacturing, EMW & Cyber, Weapons & Systems, Energy, as well as the key foundational domains of each: “big data”, machine learning & artificial intelligence (AI). We envision that our action research, focused on growing & sustaining this cross-domain COI, will reveal real-time examples of value as (for example) the Navy’s newly forming data strategy extends across the NRDE organizations, programs and projects. Like a long range radar, the COI will help to identify formation of patterns, create meaning, understand implications & promote ensuing strategies, with the ultimate goal of avoiding enterprise surprise.

This project encourages NPS students & faculty to work with the NRDE across the strategic investment areas, seeding long term collaboration between NPS, the Fleet & the NRDE. Estimated budget funds labor for 6 faculty across 4 quarters with their students to actively participate in the study. A report of findings will be provided.
Keywords
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