Future Capability Group Open Innovation Laboratory

The Future Capability Group (FCG) aims to provide Front Line Commands (FLC) and Defence Equipment & Support (DE&S) with an improved and expanded delivery capability for innovation projects and novel or cross cutting technologies.

In achieving this the FCG recognise the importance of engaging with a diverse community bringing together problem owners (Desirability), solution providers (Feasibility) and financiers (Viability) from across sectors. FCG recognises that new capability isn’t all about the technology, it’s about the people and the processes which the capability is devised, acquired and operates in.

This FCG Open Innovation Laboratory (OIL), facilitated by Team Defence Information (TD-Info), will provide a mechanism for open collaboration and development of focused use cases with input from across Commands, industry sectors and academia.

‘Open innovation’ refers to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world promoting an information age mindset toward innovation countering the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional research labs.

This FCG OIL will provide a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries, using pecuniary and non-pecuniary mechanisms in line with the DE&S’s business model.

This activity acknowledges that open innovation is not solely firm-centric: it also includes creative consumers and communities of user innovators. The boundaries between the MOD and its environment have become more permeable; innovations can easily transfer inward and outward between Defence, across Sectors and between creative consumers, resulting in impacts at the level of the operator, pan-Defence, across sectors and throughout society.

At this stage it is not intended to create an extant working group but envisaged that FCG OIL will create a community contributing to activities that will vary depending on the specific mutually beneficial outcomes to be achieved. These could include:

• Reviewing and providing industry input to strategy, policy and planning documents
• Collaborative focussed workshops ‘ideating’ around specific problems and solutions
• Providing briefings and early engagement on future commercial opportunities
• Sharing knowledge through seminars covering the latest policy process, technology and operating models

The FCG OIL will not focus solely on the technology but overcoming the blockers to enable commercialisation of technology and new ways of working across Defence.