WEST BETHESDA, Md. –
Jared Soltis from the Sea-Based Aviation and Aeromechanics Branch and Nicholas Jones from the Physical Metallurgy and Fire Performance Branch at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division are like any other engineer; they have ideas for projects they want to accomplish and need funding to do so. Sometimes ideas get reworked through levels of brainstorming and do not meet the sponsor’s intent by the time it reaches them, often leading to a proposal rejection with no feedback.
Soltis and Jones want to create a new way for engineers to develop proposal ideas; one that presents a more fluid system for proposal generators to engage with the right people earlier in the process to get the fullest prospects out of their ideas.
“There’s a very low hit rate between proposal generation and actual funded projects,” said Soltis, who has been at Carderock for just over two years. Jones, approaching seven years at Carderock, added, “Sometimes you put in a lot of work in the proposals and then you get no feedback as to whether or not it was good or bad.”
This issue put the duo on the path of conducting a social experiment through the Technical Director’s Innovation Challenge (TDIC) to determine how they could get proposal generators, sponsors and other stakeholders to connect and build upon ideas more effectively. Both Jones and Soltis perceive the proposal generation process could be made more efficient through increased collaboration across stakeholders during ideation. Jones said that proposal writing is a great way to “get the brain juices going,” but the team has an idea that they think would make the final proposal more effective and tailored to the sponsor’s needs.
What Soltis and Jones envision is a social media-inspired network for ideas to be shared and refined in a free forum without the fear of ideas being stolen. “It’s a much more collaborative environment, it’s not a matter of competing,” Jones said.
Neither knew each other prior to beginning this project, meeting at a science and technology talk with Dr. Jack Price, Carderock’s director of research. Both of them had an interest in knowledge management and collaboration tools prior to meeting and credited Price for providing inspiration and for bringing them together. “It’s always good to break down the barriers of departments and meet other people because I don’t talk to many people outside of my own branch. When I do, it’s only for very specific things,” Jones said.
Unlike a typical project with inanimate objects as the subjects, Soltis and Jones had to depend on audience participation to make progress. They faced early struggles to receive quality feedback from their target audiences, in part because of the limits to what they were able to use for their testing.
“Given the financial limitations of TDICs, we were only able to use software that is currently available to us,” Soltis said. “Although there is commercial software that does these functions very well, we chose to use the Fusion suite of tools to conduct our experiments.” By the end of their third and final experiment, Soltis said they finally got feedback he thinks “showed the ability to do some of these social interactions.”
The team was invited to a Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) tech council meeting during their research to interact with leadership and explain their project. The people they spoke with were receptive to the idea of streamlining communication and had their own projects to solve similar problems in the workforce. While that council did not have the power to enact top-level changes, they were very interested in improving the collaborative experience at the working level and provided technical points of contact (TPOCs) for the brainstorming event, which was held on Fusion.
“To move forward, we need to look at commercial solutions that do these things or incorporate them into other solutions we have now,” Soltis said. The implementation of the Science and Technology Alignment and Investment Reporting System (STAIRS) across Carderock lead Soltis to believe that they have the foundation from which they can grow. They are able to measure some aspects of proposals with STAIRS, such as how many ideas are presented and how many make it past the proposal stage. “Commercial solutions do that as well, but they also have other modules to help with proposal development and ideation,” Soltis said.
With a project that is far from complete, the pair is confident that they have shown a necessity for their idea and can bring an adequate and innovative tool to Carderock and, eventually, the entire Navy.
What is TDIC?
The Technical Director’s Innovation Challenge (TDIC) was established in 2014 after Carderock employees indicated a level of anxiety over the difficulties involved with innovating and a hunger for opportunities to conduct entrepreneurial innovative activity.
The aim of the challenge is to stimulate innovation across all of Carderock’s technical and business areas: concept development, science and technology, research and development, test and evaluation, fleet support, in-service engineering, acquisition support, logistics research and development and business processes.
Participants progress through three phases: concept exploration, maturation and implementation. They have latitude during the initial phase to go where the research leads, even if it deviates from the original plan, and they are encouraged to apply the basic principles of human-centered design and are mentored to do so throughout the project.