NASA’s New Innovation Framework¹

Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin

A radio frequency engineer from rural New Hampshire contributed the best solution to a public challenge issued by NASA’s Space Life Sciences Directorate. This is a clear example of what Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer, describes as “... a notion that in our society, knowledge is widely dispersed. And if knowledge is widely dispersed, how do we capture the insights from the American people?”

Chopra also said, in the speech titled, “Rethinking Government” to a live audience at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum, “A semi-retired radio frequency engineer living in rural New Hampshire was able to share his idea on how to address this problem, and it so blew away the others whose ideas were under consideration that NASA reported it exceeded their requirements! No complicated RFP, the need for lobbyists, some convoluted processes, etc. Just a smart person...(who) was paid a modest $30,000 for his insight.”²

In 2005, NASA had to make choices about how to support the Constellation Program, an ambitious program to take humans back to the moon for months at a time. It was designed eventually to take people to Mars, on missions longer than 2 years, requiring unprecedented preparation and planning in exchange for a wealth of understanding about space and basic survival.

“We experienced a 45% reduction in R&D budgets during the process of getting Constellation up and running,” said Dr. Jeff Davis, Director of the Space Life Sciences Directorate (SLSD) at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We knew those resources weren’t coming back and we thought to ourselves, we can’t get this done by just doing 45% less, we need to approach this whole program in a new way."

Realizing it must redefine its program within resource constraints, Jeff and his team (some 160 civil servants and 800 contractors) opened their minds to new ways of imagining work, resourcing, and even innovation itself.

“Early the next year, in 2006, we ran a visioning exercise that outlined four possible future scenarios,” he said. “We selected the one that focused on forming alliances to leverage our internal work. We then wrote a strategic plan in 2007 and conducted a benchmark study focused on forming alliances. In our study, we found that alliance forming organizations routinely scored high in measures of their ability to produce innovations.”

Later, after Davis and his team took a course at Harvard Business School titled “Leading Change and Organization Renewal” (LCOR), the SLSD began its pursuit of open innovation in earnest. To begin, the SLSD reviewed the gaps in its research and development portfolio and ran a portfolio mapping exercise designed by Professor Gary Pisano at Harvard Business School on “the four ways to collaborate.”

Davis said, “We had pretty complete coverage in the quadrant labeled ‘hierarchical and closed’—but we quickly learned that if we wanted to close the gaps in our total innovation program, we needed to better leverage external innovation platforms.”

"It was,” he said, “a thorough process of defining our entire body of work, evaluating which pieces we wanted to keep inside versus outside, defining gaps, and finally assessing which innovation model made sense for each gap area. But you have to take it that seriously, and do the homework or you’ll miss opportunities. This has been a 4-year journey for us. Then, in 2010, the Office of Management and Budget published guidance on using prizes to stimulate innovation, and we realized our efforts were aligned with an overall strategy of the Federal government.”

Davis and his team had become aware of InnoCentive through the Harvard course and shortly thereafter NASA began a pilot program with InnoCentive (one of three overall that included Yet2.com and TopCoder), the Waltham-based innovation marketplace, to run seven “high-value challenges” that NASA felt would benefit from the “innovation mall” model of open collaboration.

Participants from around the world, 579 of them, took a close look at the “Data-Driven Forecasting of Solar Events” challenge on InnoCentive’s website. The problem was finding a suitable method to more reliably predict the solar particle storms originating with solar events. These storm’s particles can be a hazard to spacecraft and astronauts above the earth’s atmosphere. They also impact weather. Fourteen complete proposed solutions were submitted. After reviewing them, NASA issued a success award to Bruce Cragin, a semiretired radio frequency engineer.

Cragin holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering physics and a doctorate in applied physics. He has 15 years experience in plasma physics basic research and another 13 years of industrial experience as a radio frequency engineer.

The challenge was “right in the ‘sweet-spot,’” Cragin said. “Though I hadn’t worked in the area of solar physics as such, I had thought a lot about the theory of magnetic reconnection. Also, the image analysis skills I acquired in the 1980s, while looking into something called the ‘small comet hypothesis,’ turned out to be very useful.” As with many novel ideas, the fusion of skills and specific experiences enabled Cragin to see the problem and propose a solution that had escaped others focused primarily on the discipline of solar physics.

And as Cragin “daisy-chains” these cross-disciplinary approaches, he notes that the work he did on the NASA challenge, “focused my attention on predictive modeling. That led to another challenge involving maize genetics to which I also submitted a solution and became a finalist. The computational tools acquired in that work are now being applied in two additional challenges, both genetics-related.”

“The NASA employees who write, run, and evaluate our challenges are converts and advocates of open innovation because they get good results,” said Dr. Jennifer Fogarty, Space Life Sciences Innovation Lead.

Davis, who is leading this transformation, didn’t always find the going easy. Many of those who prospered under an old framework of innovation emerged initially as skeptics. For example, some wondered how can you solve a major solar physics problem without years of steeping in solar physics research and study. However, the fruits of this effort are becoming increasingly apparent to his organization and to NASA as a whole. Leaders such as Davis are mapping the frontiers of innovation as they map the frontiers of space. Davis said, “Other disciplines in NASA are now considering conducting challenges based on our experience. Our experiences with open innovation have created an opportunity for us to be thought leaders in this practice; our early experiences show that open innovation is faster and more cost-effective than some traditional problem-solving tools. We’re now working on a decision framework to determine how newer and older problem-solving methods work best together. And, there’s a real element of fun and participation to it. It changes how you think.”

Endnotes

1 . Jeff Davis, NASA, in personal communications and discussion with John Dila and Alpheus Bingham, and Bruce Cragin in personal communication with John Dila, November and December, 2010.

2 . Aneesh Chopra, “Rethinking Government” (remarks to the Personal Democracy Forum 2010, Graduate Center, City University of New York, June 4, 2010), http://pdfnyc.civicolive.com/2010/06/04/rethinking-government-with-aneesh-chopra/, and YouTube video, posted June 12, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbHrLVEUDZE.