The Pentagon Said ‘Go Faster.’ To Get There, The Air Force Is Crowdsourcing Innovation.

When Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued his lengthy memo on transforming the defense acquisition system late last year, there was a lot of buzz around the new portfolio acquisition executive model. Its implementation is clearly intended to message to the enterprise that military leadership is focused on outcomes, not process—or as they would say it, capabilities.

The ‘how’ will be sorted out as organizations implement the required changes, but the memo makes the ‘so what’ abundantly clear: “Speed to capability delivery is now our organizing principle.”

Go faster!

This call to arms is trickling down to the military’s innovation organizations, and this year’s iteration of the U.S. Air Force’s Squadron Innovation Fund meets the moment for three reasons: it encourages speed over process by empowering squadron-level leaders; it acts on real-time demand signal from the enterprise to fund the most promising efforts; and it leverages data and metrics that allow those investments to grow for the joint force over time.

SIF Marketplace, if you don’t know, is the competition-style virtual marketplace of ideas the Air Force uses to inject funding at the tactical level into promising efforts. SIF started in 2018 under Gen. David Goldfein’s tenure as Air Force chief of staff and was intended to empower Airmen-led innovative projects. Airmen submit their ideas, and they get access to dedicated funding to move them out of the ideation stage and into more developed phases of prototyping or fielding.

Speed Over Process

Innovation is inherently fast. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy around innovation efforts is inherently slow. Innovation competitions are a common tool organizations use to try to overcome the slowness of the bureaucracy. It makes sense: get the good ideas together, apply some standardized funding, and let the magic happen.

The problem usually happens with the process of a competition itself. How do you source ideas? That requires getting the word out across disparate organizations. Who judges the winners? And to that point, who decides what criteria the efforts are judged on?

The Air Force’s approach is ingenious because it runs the competition out of the same system—VISION—where Airmen already manage and progress their efforts, and then it empowers leaders at the squadron level to apply a portion of the funds to the efforts that matter most to their mission. It’s a bit like letting the free market decide, which will always be more efficient in large systems. To do this, the SIF marketplace operates on a gamified token system for quick ‘voting’ that leads to faster funding and some pretty interesting network effects.

Real-time Demand Signals

Now, full disclosure, I am the head of customer success for VISION. So, while I am absolutely biased, I am also in the best position to explain why employing the platform for SIF makes sense in the new paradigm of speed.

VISION is the DoW’s joint innovation portfolio management platform. It is not the first system to be used for this competition. Previous iterations of the SIF marketplace were run through a static campaign that did not allow visibility of projects beyond what had been submitted. What makes VISION unique (and uniquely fitted to this task) is that it works essentially from the ground up. It was built in close coordination with military innovators to be a home for solving problems collaboratively. It is not tied to one process or methodology. Innovation is way bigger than one way of doing things! It creates the structure to give wide visibility of what efforts are being worked around the ecosystem, unconstrained by the walls of individual organizations.

What does all that really mean? The Air Force—and Airmen themselves—have clear visibility of what others are working on, and therefore, a clear view of demand signals. Of who needs what and where. Within the SIF marketplace, this visibility is a force multiplier. As squadron commanders come together to fund the best ideas, they aren’t limited to what their team is working on. Multiple maintenance officers, for example, can pool their resources into an effort that will benefit the enterprise. This is how the Air Force gets feedback from the field about what matters.

Data Means More Than Just Fund And Forget

Here’s another area a traditional innovation competition comes up short. Say you find a good idea and fund it. What’s next? Does the group funding the project have the resources, let alone the ability to track the value of that investment?

This isn’t an intellectual exercise. The secretary’s memo said, “Every process, board, and review must justify its existence by demonstrating how it directly supports accelerating capability delivery to meet Warfighter needs.”

By running the marketplace out of a system that captures lifecycle data tailored to military innovation (think organizational hierarchy, technology types, use cases, and more), seed funding can be truly that. A project that meets the threshold to receive SIF money stays in the same system as it grows, giving others even outside the Air Force the ability to see it and invest in it further and ultimately put capabilities in the hands of warfighters faster.

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This is the second year the SIF marketplace is hosted on VISION, and the competition is underway. I am so excited to see what efforts squadron commanders invest in during this cycle. Air Force innovators can learn more by going to VISION here to review the SIF Marketplace Playbook.

Stacey Kessler is the Director of Customer Success for VISION. The views represented in this commentary are her own and do not constitute endorsement by the Department of the Air Force or any U.S. Government entity.