Stimulating Discovery

Abstract

Innovation is critical for maintaining competitive advantage in a high tech global economy, especially for organizations or nations that do not possess lowcost labor forces. Many studies on innovation attempt to identify endogenous and exogenous variables that impact innovation [7], in order to better understand the environment that promotes innovation. The author’s recent efforts have focused on developing processes for enhancing innovation that exploit the transference of information and insights among seemingly disparate disciplines. The objective of this paper is to describe and demonstrate a hybrid tandem literature-workshop approach to innovation that eliminates the weaknesses but retains the strengths of each component. The literaturebased component identifies the technical disciplines related to the central technical theme of interest, the experts in these disciplines, and promising candidate concepts for innovative solutions. These outputs define the agenda and participants for the workshop-based component. An example of this combined approach is presented for the theme of Autonomous Flying Systems. The hybrid approach appears to be an excellent vehicle for enabling innovation. However, it requires substantial time and effort in both phases.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not represent the views of the department of the Navy.