Research, Development, and Innovation: How to Innovate, not Duplicate (Part 1)
Evan Janis, former Principal Consultant
Washington, D.C.
Government science and technology organizations face intense pressure to deliver game changing research and development (R&D) results to their customers to maximize emerging technology capabilities while demonstrating return on investment (ROI). To meet this demand, government agencies are quick to elicit needs from stakeholder portfolios and translate those into tangible solutions. While this can lead to early wins, it also has unintended consequences to include partial or overlapping solutions. Why?
Source of Duplication: Government agencies have come to a point where responding to their customer and stakeholder’s new and emerging needs within an ever changing landscape is business as usual. Agencies are working to lean forward with innovation challenges, accelerator programs, and there is a big push around the optimization of organizational structures and processes to address this new way of business. This big push includes the creation of R&D portfolios that can quickly respond to emerging technology such as NextG wireless, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, given the specialized resources needed. Agencies benefit from this structure as it provides domain-specialized resources within the portfolio, focused outcomes and goals, and greater stakeholder collaboration. However, the portfolio structure presents challenges such as:
Stakeholder needs that only flow bottom-up through the portfolio, whereas this vital input also centrally requires top-down flow via the formal enterprise; and
Silos, as each portfolio is relatively self-sustaining with all the resources it needs to accomplish the portfolio outcomes.
Therein lies the problem as stakeholder inputs are slow to reach the enterprise level or be shared systematically beyond the portfolio level. As a result, two portfolios could be working to address similar stakeholder needs concurrently and miss opportunities to collaborate and leverage emerging solutions. In part two of this series, we will dive into the role of stakeholder validation in this landscape.
Overcoming Duplication Challenges: Strong support systems and processes serve as the primary method for overcoming the challenges described above. While government agency portfolio structures differ, it is vital that stakeholder needs are organized at the enterprise level and information flows freely between portfolios to overcome the challenge. This can be accomplished by:
Enterprise Level Clearinghouses - Enterprise-level matrix structures are often used to leverage non-portfolio specific resources across portfolios (for example, IT personnel that support the enterprise network). The same principle can be used to establish a stakeholder needs clearinghouse, in which needs are collected, vetted, and coordinated among portfolios at the enterprise level. The clearinghouse has visibility into each portfolio and contains personnel with broad subject matter expertise. This structure also enables centralized analysis of requirements leveraging data such as industry trends, legislation, and criticism data, and landscape assessments to ensure internal and external R&D solutions can be identified.
Knowledge Management Systems - Enterprise level reporting is an important tool for leadership to have broad awareness across agencies' portfolios. While not intended to provide detailed information on each activity or stakeholder need, the idea of sharing information across the enterprise using knowledge management systems can overcome the challenges of silos described above. Knowledge management systems (such as Corner Alliance’s Biomedical Research and Information Network (BRAIN) developed for National Institutes of Health) combined with regular R&D activity level updates can provide researchers with detailed insight into activities across portfolios. Researchers can quickly search and find R&D activity details such as the stakeholder needs that influenced the effort and expected or resulting outcomes to help inform their solutions. In doing so, the likelihood of duplicate solutions is decreased and opportunities to leverage existing or in-progress R&D is increased.
How Corner Alliance Can Help
Corner Alliance has 14+ years supporting science and technology organizations with their research and development programs and portfolios. Our consultants across several agencies such as DHS, NIST, NTIA, and DOE have experience optimizing agency R&D portfolios, programs, and projects and building strategies to maximize research, development, and innovation. Corner Alliance helps the government to make an impact by ensuring they are innovating, not duplicating R&D.
Author
Evan Janis, PMP, former Principal Consultant supporting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science & Technology Directorate (S&T), has a mission to build trusted relationships that empower teams to tackle the challenges that the government faces. Before joining Corner Alliance, he spent 10+ years supporting public safety across all levels of government.