Teaching the Science of Innovation to Military Members

This past summer, more than a dozen members of the Untied States military from several branches came to Duke University with one goal in mind—learn the science of innovation. And maybe solving a couple of major challenges for the Department of Defense while they were at it.

Called “Design Defense Studio,” the program is an accelerated nine-week course taught by husband-and-wife duo Robb and Kate Olsen for Duke Engineering’s Master of Engineering Management program. It is based on an existing Duke course called eLuminate Studio that was also crafted by Robb Olsen, which looks to take either Duke intellectual property opportunities or private industry challenges and have students create a fundable proposition for a route to commercialization.

“I’ve taken all of the best innovation methodologies and frameworks from around the world and molded them together into a course meant to teach students a structured approach to innovation using new concepts like alpha innovation hypothesis and lean design thinking,” said Robb Olsen, who originated the class for Northwestern University in 2016 before coming to Duke. “We teach them how to get from a standing start to a fundable proposition in just a quarter or a semester, or in this case, just nine weeks.”

Service members spend six of those weeks back at their regular stations and jobs, working on their projects in teams. And every third week they come together on Duke’s campus for intensive full-day classroom and group activities to catalyze each portion of the project. At the end of their journey, all of the participants also walk away from the experience with graduate engineering course credit from Duke.

The challenges they’re tasked with solving aren’t easy, either. Countering the threat of small drones to troops in combat situations. Distributing intelligence to ground forces and allies quickly without compromising security. Determining locations and coordinating movements when satellites and GPS have been knocked out.

Without any existing expertise in these areas, the team members are forced to work outside their comfort zones and interview military stakeholders about their needs in each of these areas. They then scour research projects from Duke and elsewhere to find potential solutions, eventually landing on a plausible path forward by the end of the nine weeks and pitching a fundable product to a few dozen military leaders capable of acting on them.

“I’m impressed with their ability to dig into an area where they don’t have expertise, go out and find world-class experts, some of them right here at Duke, who can help them with the challenge and stitch all that back together,” Robb Olsen said. “That’s what we teach, and their ability to adapt to our pace in such a short period of time and produce an outstanding innovation output is really impressive.”

“We at ARCWERX wanted to create a program that would provide solutions to DoD strategic imperatives while teaching advanced innovation skill sets to our soldiers and airmen,” said Daniel “Danny” Smith, ARCWERX CEO and military program director for Design Defense Studio. “Working with Robb, Kate and the entire Duke staff to create this premier education opportunity for the Air National Guard has been incredible. Design Defense Studio, Cohort 1, was a great success, and we look to replicate that in future cohorts. With the immediate success of this program, we are excited to see what this new partnership with Duke University brings in future projects.”

Take, for example, the challenge of determining locations and communicating movement plans without satellites or GPS. After learning more about the needs of both combatants and rescue operations, the team of four students dug into the research. The solution they came up with uses a modern cell phone’s imaging and computational abilities to take a photo of the sky and use the stars to pinpoint its location.

“We’re using stars just like we did centuries ago, but with the computing power that we have in our smartphones now,” said Major Bryant Ellis-Moore, a senior medical services officer for the Michigan Air National Guard. “With the ability to run algorithms on those stars and just a little bit of additional data from your last known position on the Earth, it should be able to provide you a pretty reasonable estimation of your current position, and then you can use that to continue to navigate.”

Besides discovering and pitching these types of solutions, part of the goal of the program is for the students to then be able to bring these innovation processes and mindsets back to their current stations.

“One of the most interesting things for me was the Michigan model of leadership and looking at team development,” said Anthony Tanner Brokaw, a senior intelligence officer for the 161^st Air Refueling Wing. “If you build a team based on subject matter experts, you get a lot of subject matter experts. Which is great, but they may not be able to leverage each other’s capabilities. The Michigan model instead focuses on the strengths and personalities of the team. That way, you learn to lean on each other and really utilize your strengths, wherever they may lie.”

“One of the things that’s important in this class, is that not only are we teaching the students how to do innovation so they can return to their day to day job and be innovators, but we’re letting them do it in a real world situation so that the learning sticks,” added Kate Olsen.