JANUARY 15, 2025 – Over the past three years, the Defense Innovation Board has been a powerful advisory resource to advance innovation within the Defense Department, and to provide the secretary and deputy secretaries of defense with independent, practical, and actionable advice and recommendations about how to make use of that innovation.
“The Defense Innovation Board has played a pivotal role in driving innovation within the [Defense Department],” said Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III. “Over the past four years, the DIB’s diverse expertise and practical recommendations have provided the department with valuable insights and actionable strategies to accelerate innovation at speed and scale, ensuring that the DOD remains at the forefront of technological advancements and prepared to meet the challenges of the future.”
The board originally stood up in February 2016. After a brief hiatus and subsequent reappointed in 2021, the insights and recommendations provided by the DIB have continued to strengthen department efforts to scale and adopt innovative technologies and systems.
“Innovation is a never-ending imperative for DOD, and I’m deeply proud of the progress we’ve made over the last four years — substantially lowering barriers to innovation across the DOD-enterprise, from the boardroom to the battlespace,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. “There’s no doubt about it: innovation adoption is fundamentally a change-management problem. That’s why we’ve employed an effective theory of change — building trust and confidence across the defense enterprise, demonstrating what’s possible, rewarding game-changers, and promoting the best ideas and success through teamwork.”
Board Chairman Michael M. Bloomberg was nominated to lead the board in February 2022 by Austin. Since that time, he has guided board efforts related to artificial intelligence, software, data, digital transformation, culture change and workforce development.
“Serving on the Defense Innovation Board has been an honor and a responsibility we committed to in support of our men and women in uniform,” Bloomberg said.
Since its reappointment, the DIB has delivered eight significant studies with more than 150 strategic and tactical recommendations meant to breach innovation barriers and furnish state-of-the-art capabilities to the warfighter more quickly and at scale.
In July 2023, for instance, the DIB delivered a study titled “National Defense Science and Technology Strategy: An Innovation Strategy for the Decisive Decade,” which focused on aligning the department to its first congressionally authorized NDSTS. A second study, titled “Strategic Investment Capital Task Force Study: Terraforming the Valley of Death,” discussed the time it takes for a contractor within the industrial base to transition a prototype or commercially available product to a DOD contract.
In January 2024, the study “Lowering Barriers to Innovation” examined key domains related to innovation, including leadership, security, enterprise license agreements and dual-use technologies, for instance. That report also outlined specific barriers to innovation, business outcomes that might result from the removal of those barriers and pragmatic steps for implementation.
The “Building a DOD Data Economy” study, also made available in January 2024, focused on establishing reliable and scalable data access, and treating data as a product to support the warfighter. That study provided best practices adopted from industry and adapted to the DOD context in areas such as leadership, people, process, technology, incentives and implementation.
From those four reports alone, nearly half of their 73 recommendations have since been implemented within the department.
Last summer, the DIB published “Optimizing Innovation Cooperation with Allies and Partners,” which responded to challenges such as supply chain issues, comparative technical weaknesses, and threats to sustainable and interoperable partnerships. By addressing these challenges, the DIB pointed to the imperative of innovation with key allies through NATO, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the Australia-U.K.-U.S. partnership, and the Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience. The report’s recommendations ensure those partnerships remain enduring and scalable.
The “Aligning Incentives to Drive Faster Tech Adoption” study, also published last summer, focuses on aligning incentives to drive faster technology adoption within the department. That report identified gaps between current DOD and industry incentive structures and developed a communication and rollout plan to disseminate and scale these aligned incentives centering on leadership providing top cover, embracing calculated risk and iterating to learn from failure.
Since the publication of these two studies, a third of their 65 recommendations have been adopted for implementation.
This month, the DIB published two new significant studies. The first of those, “Scaling Nontraditional Defense Innovation,” focuses on using contracting to procure and field commercial and dual-use capabilities. A second report, “A Pathway to Scaling Unmanned Weapon Systems,” examines the essential elements needed to achieve superiority in manufacturing, acquiring and fielding of unmanned systems.
The DIB’s work in areas across military innovation and emerging technology adoption has been instrumental in advancing the department’s innovation agenda, Austin said.
Additional information can be found on DIB reports and recommendations.
By C. Todd Lopez, DOD News