Many may consider this heresy, but there appears to be a slow, but growing, trend towards open sourcing in the U.S. aerospace industry. For those charged with developing new systems for the military, this may appear to be extraordinarily unwise, impractical, and not something the U.S. Department of Defense should do. Similarly, for those developing state-of-the art systems for commercial use, questions immediately arise about the ownership and protection of key intellectual property (IP) rights. As a result, some might question why this concept is even being considered and whether these more open approaches to sourcing should be applied to the aerospace industry.
Before proceeding, it may be helpful to point out that what we are really talking about are new forms of collaboration. In a December 2008 article in the Harvard Business Review, Pisano and Verganti propose a framework for assessing when to use different types of collaboration. While it is beyond the scope of this blog to address their article in detail, there is evidence to suggest that some of the nontraditional approaches described by these authors can lead to faster and better solutions than the traditional product development process. Even though security and intellectual property rights must still be addressed, DARPA, NASA, and other agencies are exploring ways to use crowd sourcing, social networking and other techniques to develop new systems and solutions.
UAVForge is an example. According to DARPA’s website,
UAVForge is a crowdsourcing competition sponsored by DARPA and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic to design, build and manufacture advanced small unmanned air vehicle (UAV) systems. The goal is to facilitate the exchange of ideas among a loosely connected international community united through common interests and inspired by innovation and creative thought.
The UAVForge program management team just announced the fly-off finalists and the results can be viewed at http://www.uavforge.net/uavhtml/#
The UAVForge experiment is significant at many levels. For senior managers and policymakers, these more open approaches expand the envelope of our thinking about how to solve problems and develop new solutions. For primes and OEMs, these new forms of collaboration represent new opportunities to design and build products faster, better and cheaper. For small to medium aerospace manufacturers, this new paradigm could potentially expand the opportunities available to them.
After all, as stated by one program manager at DARPA, U.S. firms do not have a monopoly on good ideas, and if companies or government agencies can figure out how to access and organize ideas from outside their boundaries, the opportunities for innovation expand tremendously.
In the end, however, it’s all about leadership and DARPA and the other agencies deserve credit for what they are trying to do. The willingness to take risks is one of the hallmarks of the U.S. aerospace industry. It is also one of the characteristics of top performing leaders. While open sourcing may not be suitable for all projects or programs, it has the potential to transform the way we think about research, development, and the production and support of new systems. It may also be just what industry needs in our current economic environment. Your thoughts?
