Painful Budgets Induce Innovation

Although the U.S. Defense Department and the military industry are feeling the effects of constrained budgets, they have not yet been forced to find truly innovative solutions, Mark Bigham, chief innovation officer for Raytheon Intelligence and Information Services, told the AFCEA TechNet Augusta 2014 audience.

Bigham quoted Winston Churchill as saying that Americans will always do the right thing after they’ve exhausted all other alternatives. He also cited another Churchill quote: "Gentlemen, we have run out of money, now we have to think."

One end of the innovation spectrum is driven by basic curiosity, the other by life and death, Bigham said. “People get amazingly innovative—they learn how to do things faster, better, cheaper—the closer they get to death. Another thing I’ve noticed is that people and companies behave much the same way. The closer they are to financial death, the more they will change, innovate and adapt to survive.”

The defense industry “is not yet there,” he asserted. “We’re almost there. We’re not quite there. I don’t see the pain threshold we need to get to that point, but we’re close to that,” he said. Bigham said he brought up the issue because, “We’re at the epicenter of a marathon. We’re within a mile of it. Right now today, the cyber world, the IT world is the fastest changing technology on the planet,” he stated.

While a few years ago people may have quoted Moore’s law in saying that the lifespan of a technology was about 18 months, that lifespan is now about a week. “The cyber people will tell you the lifespan of the technology they’re dealing with is patch Tuesday,” he said, explaining that once a week, software is patched to ensure systems remain up and running.

“At the same time, thank goodness, we’re accelerating the speed of our acquisition process to match that,” Bigham said. When the audience laughed, he quipped, “That’s the problem.”